


sworn sword

by lizardcookie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, Slow Build, i have no justification for this other than i wanted to give lily evans a sword, so enjoy this reverse expected gender roles body guard-ish au, there is some Mild body horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26186866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizardcookie/pseuds/lizardcookie
Summary: He's a Mage, One of Nine, Last of His Line. She's a foot soldier, one of far too many in this war waged by far too few, but at one point he was just Potter and she was just Evans and things were good. That was before, though, and this is now. A decade has come and gone between before and now, a war has come and stayed between before and now, but the memory of her never left him. He remembers her and thinks she might remember him, too.-fantasy-realm au. lily evans has a sword.
Relationships: James Potter & Lily Evans Potter, James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Comments: 97
Kudos: 81





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> give lily evans a sword 2020

“New guard,” Moody grunts in response to the question communicated solely through his raised eyebrow. He likes Moody. Man of few words but many grunts. Entertaining, at the least.

“What happened to the old guard?” James asks, eyebrow still up.

“Didn’t like ‘em,” Moody grunts again in what he assumes is a complete and coherent answer. He does elaborate when James doesn’t immediately respond, muttering, “They were either too soft or too compromised. You decide which reason to toss ‘em you like better.”

James shrugs. He couldn’t blame anyone for being ‘soft’ by Moody’s standards. A titanium knife might be considered soft by his standards in the wrong mood. But James doesn’t want to risk anything after his last assassination attempt (His third. Should he be flattered?) so he just goes with it. Moody’s kept him alive so far through trek after trek and summit after summit, so he must be onto something. 

That’s what James assumes before a knife is at his throat and a pair of arms is holding him pinned. He can’t reach his wand, not like this.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this fourth assassination attempt is how Moody just puts his face in his hand.

“You’re going to have to get a little harder to kill, brother,” hisses the voice associated with the alabaster hand holding the knife at his throat, just as James has positioned his locked arm to be able to elbow that free space between the chest and hip of standard order armor. James swings his elbow at the same time that Moody growls, “I thought you were  _ joking,”  _ and James is able to completely break through this grip, handle the hand with the knife, twist the arm over his shoulder before going to kick and coming nose to to nose with—

“Sirius?”

His grin is that of a mad man’s, not that of someone who just tried to commit treason by taking out the life of one of the Mages.

Behind him, Moody growls out “ _ Black”  _ in both warming and reprimand. But James only cares for the reaction of the man before him, the face of a stranger both so fucking  _ familiar  _ and foreign at the same time.

“Well, then,” Sirius grimaces, rubbing the spot where James’ elbow had attempted to puncture an internal organ with the hand that isn’t captured in James’, “Maybe you aren’t so easy to kill after all, or the others would have succeeded.”

James is still shocked, standing in front of his best friend for the first time in almost a  _ decade _ , can’t believe he hasn’t changed a single bit. Same beautiful, carefree smirk on his face when he stops grimacing, same disgraceful and beautiful way his hair frames his face, gets tucked behind his ear. Same pale skin against black hair, same crooked smile when he says, “Alright, Potter?”

“Alright?” James sputters, staring at him. Somewhere past Sirius’ shoulder, Moody is lecturing something awful about  _ Attempted assassinations get the same time as successful ones  _ and  _ Thought you were mad before this and now what the hell am I supposed to do with you?  _ James doesn’t care about Moody’s reprimands as he pulls Sirius into a full hug, Sirius’ silver plate metal clanging loud in contrast to James’s soft, vibrant velour Mage’s robes.

“Alright?” James repeats, almost gleeful and completely undignified. “Brilliant! More than brilliant! What are you doing here?”

Sirius grins back at James, just like he used to, just like they used to before the world went to shit. Sirius’ shiny metal armor bares  _ his  _ insignia, which is the weirdest fucking thing of it all, seeing his mother’s lion holding a flower between its teeth, stars behind them, emblazoned on his best friend’s chest.

“We’re the 78th,” Sirius says, like that’s an explanation. “Didn’t you know?”

At Sirius’ use of  _ we,  _ other figures appear at his shoulder, magic. James feels like a kid in the Academy again.

“I can’t— Great Merlin and his mother— Remus! Peter!”

“Hello,” Remus smiles, his thin, scarred face looking genuinely better for the sight of him. Remus’s brown robes (A healer’s garb. Healer! He’d learned the art of healing!) hang loosely around his body and the belt of potions and salves around his waist is comically out of proportion for his hips, but he looks good. Ten years going and Remus Lupin is still kicking, proving everyone wrong about the odds. 

“This is—“ James’ hand is gripping his hair, trying to give his brain more space to process this information. “This is brilliant.  _ You’re  _ brilliant. You’re here!”

“You look the part, Ja— sir!” Peter says next to Remus in identical brown robes, which don’t hang loose on him, but do look just as fitting on him. Peter doesn’t get to finish the rest of that thought, since James has him in one arm and Remus in the other, laughing.

“ _ Don’t  _ call me ‘sir,’ Pete, for the love of all things good and natural,” James says, standing, staring at three friends he thought he’d never see again in this form or in this timeline. Well, he would be staring at three, but Moody is dragging Sirius off by the ear, growling about how many days he’ll be stuck on kitchen duty. Sirius waves jovially back at James over his shoulder, completely unconcerned for any demeaning punishment coming his way, just like he used to be. 

Then, to his right, Remus smiles. 

“Peter’s right,” he says. “You look like a ponce.”

“Shut up,” James waves him off, smiling a face-splitting grin. “What are you doing here?” 

“Like Sirius said,” Remus shrugs, also smiling, also excited and good and  _ young  _ again. “We’re the 78th.”

“Just finished a tour off the North,” Peter adds as supplement (again, like this is an explanation, like James will just be able to fill in the gaps since he last saw them), “Eaters and snakes like you wouldn’t believe.” He shudders, pales for a moment. “Then Moody sent his owl to the captains— the Longbottoms, did you ever meet Frank, Alice?— and, well, here we are.” 

“Brilliant,” James repeats, meaning it. He forgets about the time past, about their different robes (so different from their Academy garb), forgets about the diplomat from the Ravenclaw he’s supposed to be meeting with right now. James Potter forgets so much just to be able to walk with Remus and Peter towards the infantry camp, catching up on literally nothing and everything at once. Easy, new, familiar, good.

“And your mother, Peter? She still doing alright?”

“Yes,” Peter’s ears tinge red. “Send her nearly everything I make, so she’s holding on fine. Eaters stormed Burrows not too long ago, I wish you could have been there.”

“I wish so, too,” James grimaces, face tight, heart tight with guilt. “We were tracking a false lead on an Eater stronghold all the way over by North Tower instead. I’m glad she survived. Luckier than a lot.” He makes a mental note to check his ledgers, make sure enough aid was sent to Burrows, send more if possible. 

Remus talks about the observatory they’d visited at Roost when they were sent as aid to a division assigned to assist the Ravenclaw Mages. Peter talks about the food they’d eaten during their tour in Hufflepuff, and things are good. Foot soldiers, many of whom he doesn’t recognize, which means the 78th thankfully isn’t  _ just  _ his entire class from the Academy, amble about this part of camp, laughing freely with one another, greeting Remus and Peter and staring at him openly. James can’t bring himself to be bothered.

He was wrong, before, about not recognizing any of the other guard. He recognizes this one like his own reflection, like he’d recognize a memory, like he’d recognize a stranger he met in a dream.

In the full armor of a foot soldier rather than medic sits a short guard, her expression matching the steely plate of her occupation. The sight actually makes him stop walking, stop breathing, for reasons not entirely known to him then. He shouldn’t be shocked; of course she’d be with the others if this is truly the reunion of his dreams, but for some reason, the sight of her in armor— armor adorned with  _ his  _ insignia, the one with the lion and the flower and the constellation, the one he designed when he took the mantle— is a complete shock to him, yet not a surprising thing at all. 

Lily Evans doesn’t smile at him, even though he’s beaming at her. He doesn’t care how they left things.

“Evans,” James greets, the name falling from his lips for the first time in a decade. The bustle of the rest of the camp fades away in the background. Remus and Peter fade away, too, talking to a blonde soldier in leather armor.

She doesn’t stop polishing her sword, whetstone sharpening a blade that doesn’t seem to need sharpening. He remembers her cutting wit; that she’s got a sword to match it must be such a lethal combination that he wonders how they're still at war in the first place.

He’s still smiling, she still isn’t. “Good to see you.”

“Mage,” she acknowledges, holding up her sword to the light, examining her work. Maybe she makes it reflect in his eye the way it does on purpose, making him blink the light away. He wants to laugh, petty, clever, the same way she used to be able to fight other students and not get caught like he got caught. She draws her attention away from her sword, looking at him through the corner of almond-shaped emerald eyes, eyes he could never forget. “Though, do you prefer your full title? What is it these days?" Her voice takes on a more mocking tone. "Great Mage, One of Nine, Last of his Line?”

“Oh, come now,” he waves her off. “You know I didn’t pick that. I would have come up with something  _ much  _ more impressive.”

“Oh, of course,” she says sweetly, chipper. “Something far more self-aggrandizing. I'm surprised you only settled for 'Great.' I expected more from you.”

James ignores the jab (ignores the insubordination). She has reason to be upset, she has reason to distrust him. Lily Evans is a wandless foot soldier in a world where she should have been one of the country’s most prominent alchemists. 

“You might not believe me,” James says, quietly, just for her to hear. Remus and Peter are still talking to a different soldier. “But I am happy to see you. Even if you don’t feel the same.”

Evans looks at him again from the corner of her eye. Softer this time. Apologetic. It occurs to him that maybe she’s not angry. Maybe she’s a little embarrassed, like he is. She remembers him; she knows him, like he knew she would.

And then she stands up, sheaths her sword, hand going to rest at the hilt at her side. She was never very tall, but she seems so in her armor. Her chin is sharp, her hair pulled back. Last time he saw her it was shoulder length and curly, feminine and pretty, young and sweet even though she was never sweet to him and he never deserved anything other than her sharp tongue. Now it’s braided behind her, tucked away. James has seen her in dresses and robes and uniforms and gowns when they were kids, teens, youths running about without a care in the world. Maybe they’re still youths, but he’s got many cares for the world and suspects she does, too. Anyway, he’s never seen her more striking, and he tries not to focus on that thought for too long.

Lily doesn’t let his mind linger. She bends her head forward in respect.

“Sir,” she says, stepping back, already walking off. She points to the Ravenclaw diplomat sitting outside his tent, tapping her foot impatiently. “I think you’re late to an appointment, no?”

Then, Remus is smiling at him, a little too knowingly. He whistles lightly, turns on his heel, starts walking away with a smirk across his face. “She hasn’t changed a bit.”

***

And suddenly, he has a new routine, same as the old routine. The summer months are still long and hot and filled with travel, filled with filling requests from different villages for different spell scrolls and potions and elixirs, but this time they’re filled with all that and more. Sometimes he gets to walk with Remus and Peter while they collect herbs and Sirius eats lunch with him when he’s not on duty. Sometimes James takes walks for leisure, and if he happens to find where Moody is running training drills, he might stay and watch her spar, usually with Sirius. Sometimes she’ll smile at him, sometimes he’ll wave back. The days are the same as before except different, wonderfully new and old and familiar and good. 

He’d told McGonagall, Mage of Many Forms, the good news in a personal letter, added to his latest report to her as an addendum. That  _ things are fine, I’m fine, I’m good. More than good, actually. Moody managed to boot another regiment. He's hired on the 78th- have you worked with them yet? _

Her response was simple. He could practically hear her say it to him, rolling her eyes. Sighing. 

_ Godric help us all, then.  _


	2. Bored and Boring

“You have an unusual travel plan going for you, James,” Remus observes one day in those early days, standing next to James, watching him work. Remus seems peaky today. He wishes he had noticed before he ordered the camp to move again. “When we were with Flitwick’s regiment, all we did was sit around the library in Roost, waiting to be sent off. Missions weren’t very long. Mostly scouting parties.”

“Sounds like Flitwick,” James tries to hide his scoff, hopes he sounds neutral enough. “What are they calling him in Ravenclaw now?”

“Great Mage, Charmer of Charmers,” Remus snorts. “I remember his lectures in school. I can’t say I was ever charmed by them, informative though he was.”

James grins. Likes talking about the council to someone who isn’t afraid of him, or them. “Poor Flitwick. I know he didn’t come up with that one for himself.”

“Better than Lovegood’s. ‘Mage Lovegood, Lover of Good.’ It’s horrendous, really.”

That earns a full laugh from James, undignified, pointing his wand at the rolled up tent before them. In an instant, the tarps disappear, stored in his wand, ready for travel. “Now,  _ that  _ I wouldn’t put past Xenophilius to come up with himself. Have you met him? Odd bloke. It’s remarkable he was ever appointed.”

Remus walks with James over to the next bundle of tents, ignoring the rest of the to-do in the camp as guards pack their pack, check their horses. He watches James pack this set again, eyes lingering on his wand. James wonders when the last time Remus saw magic— real magic, good magic, not what the Eaters do— in action. 

“So?” Remus asks again, ever politely curious as they continue packing camp. “What explains your oddity, then? None of the other Nine leave their strongholds like you do.”

James takes a careful moment to answer, pretending to re-tie a loose knot used to roll the tent, even if it is just about to be stored in a pocket dimension. He’s got a lot of answers he could give his old friend:

The honest one, which is that the Hollows are lonely with him as the only Potter left, hallowed halls which had once been filled with his mother’s humming and father’s brewing and Sirius’ laughter, now filled instead with the preoccupations and adornments of war.

The politician’s answer, which is that he’s different than the other eight Mages, that he isn’t hiding from Voldemort’s necromancers like they are, that he wants to be remembered as someone who did more than hide while the world fell apart.

Or the diplomatic approach, the one least likely to offend and most likely to please, like he’d been trained to give. 

“Eaters destroy nature. Why spend time in a library reading about magic we haven’t seen enough of to study yet?” James asks, turning his full attention to Remus. Runs a hands through his hair. “I’ve seen what buildings look like after an Eater raid, and I’ve seen what forests look like once they’d drained the life out the very air around them. I think there’s a lot to be learned from the environment.” Seeing Remus take it all in thoughtfully is marginally reassuring; Remus had been exceptional in studying the darker magics and their counters at the Academy. Maybe some of his old knowledge is relevant now, maybe not, but the task of dismantling the network of dark magic users and necromancers isn’t for Remus to worry about, so James changes the subject, cocks his eyebrow, smirks a little. “If I’m doomed to be Mage for the rest of my life, I may as well enjoy it in the outdoors.”

Remus quips his eyebrow at the word  _ doomed _ but otherwise leaves James in peace, which he appreciates. It’s tempting to open up again, to let his friends remember all his old secrets and learn new ones too, but he can’t. Remus is technically his healer, not friend, his subordinate, not confidant. The thought makes James a bit sick, but if Remus noticed a change in his mood, he didn’t mention it. A friend with tact. 

He and Remus continue about the camp, clearing tents until it’s just the guard and James and horses, the general atmosphere amiable, relaxed, for the off-duty foot soldiers milling about. Trekking back to camp center, James spies Sirius and Evans laughing together, eating their lunch before the ride out. Close. Anytime he sees them, they’re close. He’d even seen them dozing off under the shade of a tree one afternoon; the sight of it made something in him ache, desperate for that casual intimacy with people he thinks he used to know. 

Peter waves at Remus and James, beckoning them for lunch. 

“Care to join?” Remus asks. “We haven’t been able to all sit down together yet.”

“Can’t,” James says. Hopes he doesn’t sound as put out as he feels. “I have to go review the route with the Longbottoms.”

“Too bad. But another time. We’ve missed you, you know.”

“I know,” James smiles ruefully. “Another time.”

________________

“This is  _ dead _ boring, I’ll have you know,” Sirius says, lying on his back, staring at James through the curtain of hair falling in front his eyes. “I found it boring in school then and I find it boring now.”

James is staring at his arranged spell components, taking stock and inventory before sitting to do the ritual. It’d go faster if he had more people casting with him, but he’d have to double back nearly all the way to the Academy to get to Dumbledore or Hogsmeade to get to McGonagall, and the thought of asking the nearer by Hufflepuff Mages for help wouldn’t be so bad if Sprout wouldn’t make him sort through her greenhouse first or Bones wouldn’t make sure everything went through the proper channels (because frankly, it didn’t).

“You get used to it,” he mutters eventually, ticking through his list of needs again. Soil, a jewel, a bit of gold, some of his better oils...

“Can’t see how you would,” Sirius huffs, a bit petulantly. Makes James smile and almost forget the order of his pacing about the parchment, which he has been doing for the last hour or so while Sirius, who is supposed to be on duty, reclines languidly on the bench near the tent flap. 

“What’re you even making the scroll for?”

“The Burrows’ mayor wrote back. Said their crops haven’t returned to normal since the last Eater raid.”  _ Worried about his wife and plethora of kids.  _ “I’m hoping this will restore the field.” 

“Burrows is Dumbledore’s domain.”

“I’m sure he just missed this request in everything he’s got to cover. He’s Head Mage. Busy job.” 

“Doing nothing, that is.”

James looks up. Sirius needs to be careful about who he says that to. “Dumbledore cares about stopping those necromancers,” he says, talking to his completed ritual circle. “He hates Eaters. He hates Voldemort.”

“Maybe,” Sirius’ head rolls back forward, staring at the ceiling. “But Voldemort’s been around for more than just these ten years. I’ve seen Dumbledore at work. I’ve seen what he can do when he taps into his power. I’ve seen him fight Eaters, too,” Sirius turns back to James with a significant look in his eye. “He holds back.”

James sets down his wand. He’ll have to do the ritual later, when it’s quieter. Sirius has always had a knack to be thinking what he’s thinking and always had the gumption to say what that is out loud. 

“I know,” James confesses. He’s seen it. Dumbledore could do magic James could only dream of. He thinks that scared even Dumbledore. “I know him, too. He doesn’t want a massacre.”

“Depends on how you define it,” Sirius shrugs then, still lying on the bench, an attempt at coolness that does nothing to quell the anger in his meaning. “What’s one bloody day compared to ten years of slow attrition back and forth?”

_ I don’t know, _ James wants to say, but he can’t, because his loyalty is split. He understands having a code. He understands having honor. His just says not a soul should suffer while he has the ability to stop it.

Sirius must sense his hesitation. He doesn’t push him further, though James suspects he wants to. Good man, Sirius. He’s always been good, even when he’s been insufferable. 

“Scroll casting is boring,” Sirius sits up now, his hair falling right back into place. Bastard.  _ His  _ never did that, just did the sticking up all over bit that it loves. Sirius’ eyes have a glint to them. “You know what isn’t boring? Target practice.”

Sirius is right. Hours-long rituals alone  _ are  _ boring and target practice most certainly is  _ not _ . Most of the off-duty guard is tucked away, given the late hour, given the past week of hard riding, by the time Sirius leads them to the infantry section of camp where spears, arrows, and spare swords litter the earth around straw-bag targets. There in the low light of fires from torchlights and the moon, Sirius teaches him his first non-magic trick in years— knife throwing! 

“Of course, it’s far more satisfying hitting an actual Eater,” Sirius says, standing the straw-bag up, now complete with a make-shift mask just like the Eaters wear to hide their identities. “But this’ll do in a pinch.”

Sirius shows him how to stand properly, how to hold the knife (nice little silver blades, obviously cost him a pretty penny), how to add the perfect spin. The first time James’ knife hits its target feels like the first time he scored a goal from his team at Academy all those years ago. The second feels just as good, and the third even better. After a while, he’s laughing in earnest and so is Sirius, old, good, familiar, new. 

“Impressed, Evans?” 

Startled, James turns his attention from his target to find Lily Evans, sitting on a barrel, eating an apple. Her hair is down, loose around her shoulders, not in a braid. Sirius is grinning widely at her, obviously pleased to see her. James’ grin is also wide. He feels a little flushed, also obviously pleased to see her. He tosses the knife in his hand, catches it by the handle. An annoyingly quick study. That’s what he used to get told all the time, first by his mother, then by McGonagall, then by her. 

Evans raises an eyebrow at the both of them. Finishes her apple. Throws the core on the ground.

“I’m impressed you never managed to outgrow that smug look on your face, sir,” Evans says, her one eyebrow still quipped up. “Less impressed over the throwing, unfortunately.”

She’s smirking. He still is, too, despite her (accurate) insult. James throws the knife in his hands to show off, and it works— it hits the target right between its “eyes.” He needed to free his hand to run it through his hair, habit, old, new, familiar, good. 

Her eyes linger at the place the blade struck true for a moment. Her smirk looks like a smile for a moment. But then she’s standing, leaving as quick as she came, looking at Sirius rather than at him. 

“It’s late. I’m off to sleep. Are you coming, Sirius?”

“Later,” Sirius says, turning back to James, his grin still wide, his grin pleased and young and fun. “I need more time to make this one impressive.”

Sirius was right. James has been bored out of his mind for  _ years  _ now in one form or another and he’s only just now ready to admit it. He’s been lonely for years, despite the amount of people constantly coming in and going around him, and this one night spent laughing with Sirius, fucking around doing jack shit with Sirius, is almost enough to completely fill that void living in him. He has a few ideas of what could help fill the rest of the void, what’s already settling right at home back in his bones, if he could just learn how to impress her. James thinks that he’d learn how to juggle the damn knives if that’s what it took to get her to smile.

Anyway. It’s late. He has his scroll to cast, which he does, finishing the spell and thinking that all the precious artifacts in the world couldn’t compare to the power of the tangible moment of feeling like  _ this  _ at four in the morning, Sirius snoring on the bench, knives and stolen food from the mess tent thrown about. And whether or not he slept through his morning report to Moody (he did) doesn’t matter, because he woke up in time to have the scroll sent with the rest of the post with the runner, and woke up in time to see her watching him from across the clearing as he tipped more than necessary to ensure speedy delivery. 

Sirius was right. He’s been bored and he’s been boring but most of all he’s been lonely and now he’s seeing what it means to live again. 

Old, new, familiar, good. 

________________

“Makes you sick,” Moody spits on the ground next to James, his good eye narrowed in criticism. Maybe grief as well. “What a fucking disgrace.”

Disgrace might be the wrong word, James thinks, taking in the scene before him. _ Defiled. Dishonored.  _ Those are other good words. But what stands out most is  _ tragedy. _

What stands out most is the destruction. Black smoke billows from the earth, scorched, trees broken and thinned, a far cry from their fat green sisters just across the way. These trees are fragile as toothpicks, ash for bark, the grass a dry, barren wasteland. There’s a little cabin attached to an enclosure that no longer has horses or cows or whatever this family lived off of. James remembers this southern region of Hufflepuff as bountiful, bold and beautiful, and now it’s… this. What a fucking tragedy.

There is a power in life and death. There is a certain level of reverence his father always taught him to have for the natural order of things, for the ways in which the old has to die to allow for the new, for the ways in which the old never really dies and the new is never really new. There is a power in life and death that the lich Voldemort saw as fit to control himself. 

Moody walks away, shaking his head. Kicks a dead stump for good measure. They must have missed a band of Eaters by  _ minutes. _

“Peter,” James greets as his old friend dismounts his horse, steadying him by the shoulder. Peter grimaces. James sighs. He’s looking at the enclosure, running his hand over the wooden beams, over what looks like horn marks as tall as his waistline, the kind of marks unicorn foal would leave. He can’t bring himself to examine the bones left in the middle yet. 

James‘ hand finds itself in his hair. “Unfortunately, I think it’s as bad as it looks.”

“It looks awful, James,” Peter says. Whispers. Looking out at the field instead of at James. He wishes Peter would look at him instead; it’s a lot more grounding to see the face of a friend instead of watching the world burn. But then, sensing his thoughts, Peter does turn to James, an apology on his face. “Sorry. You never really get used to it.”

“You shouldn’t.” He shouldn’t. No one should. “The moment this becomes normal is the moment we really lose.”

“I guess this is what Mum’s field looked like.”

“I’m sorry, Pete. I really am.”

“S’alright,” he shrugs, manages a smile. “Her last note to me said the fields were coming back. Says her prayers to Godric really came through.”

James gives Peter another consoling pat on the shoulder, one he hopes Peter understands.  _ I’m sorry you’re here and not home. I’m sorry you got caught in a war that has so little to do with you. I’m just sorry. _

Peter and Remus start rummaging amongst the blackened earth to see how deep the destruction ran, to see if any herbs or vegetation managed to survive this. That’ll inform their poultices, what dies and what thrives in the face of this dark magic. Moody and some of the guard— the Longbottoms, Sirius, Evans, Vance, Meadowes— search for bodies, bones. Whatever’s left. 

James takes a steadying breath, pulls out his wand. Sends a message to Bones, Mage of Order, and thinks about the earful he’s going to get about unauthorized investigations in her territory, thinks about how he doesn’t care, because any evidence needs to be taken now or it might not exist by the time her crew can roll in. It’s not  _ his  _ fault Eaters hit the route they were taking to visit her, anyway. 

He sits, velvet robes striking barren dirt, and runs his fingers over the earth, leaning his head against the fowl enclosure. His next breath out is a spell for gentle passing, for whatever spirit is left here. No more suffering.

“Moody says we’ll be staying here for a few days.”

James is startled out of his meditation— didn’t realize he’d been meditating— by none other than Lily Evans. 

She’s backdropped by the orange glow from a now setting sun. He must’ve been meditating, casting, for hours. 

Takes him another moment to answer, still blinking stupidly at her. “Yes. Til Amelia Bones and her guard joins, at the very least.”

“I haven’t met her yet,” she says, tilting her head to the side. She used to do that in school, too, when she was thinking. He remembers. “I hope her regiment’s a bit more up to scratch than Sprout’s. Dolts, for the most part.”

“Get ready, then. You’ll forget how to smile by the time we’re done with her lot.” The burnt forest around them does the impossible, pulls his eyes away from hers. “Though, not much to smile about now, I suppose…”

Her voice is gentle, thoughtful, unexpected. “No, I suppose not. But this has happened before, and we still managed to smile after those other times, too.”

And then she’s smiling at him, something soft, something welcome. Something a little sad, something understanding. 

“Want to come eat? We set up a fire. Dearborn caught a few hares that are cooking now.”

“Oh.” He’s still trying to come out his trance, still trying to come back to what needs to happen now. His thinking is invariably slower around her even though, well, he thinks of her quite often now that she’s back in front of him instead of just in the back of his mind, no longer a character from a past life he couldn’t return to. “Right. I’m sorry, I never set up camp.”

“That’s alright. But it’s getting dark, and Sirius was threatening to tackle you to rouse you. I thought I’d spare you some inconvenience.” 

She’s still smiling at him. He smiles back. “Thank you for that.”

“So?” She prods, one hand resting comfortably and casually at her sword, the other at her hip. “Are you hungry?”

Yes. Starving. Their ride was supposed to end with lunch and instead ended with this debauchery. 

“I’m alright. I’ll break to set up camp, but I should get back to…” His eyes trail back over the ruined forest. 

“You’ve done enough,” Evans says quietly, reading him. She was always good at reading him. He remembers. “We’ve collected what we hope was all the bones. Buried them. They felt different... Peaceful.”

“A family?”

“Yes.”

“And the foal?”

“Also peaceful.”

When James doesn’t immediately answer her, she gives a gentle kick of her foot to his knee. 

“Come. Sit,” she commands, still gently. “Eat. You’ve done enough.”

“Alright, Evans,” he cedes, standing, tucking his wand away. “Only because you asked nicely.”

“I don’t have it in me to tease you right now,” she sighs, in step with him as they trek up the hill towards the others. “Not today. We’ve seen enough carnage.”

“That’s what you’re teasing is meant to be? Carnage? I assure you, Evans, I’ve survived worse. Worse from  _ you,  _ even.”

Her lips twitch up, almost a smile. He wishes it were a smile. “I know. But I don’t want to test how soft you’ve become under all that fancy velvet. Too many hard words and you might collapse, sir.”

James shakes his head, fighting off a smile himself. “Remus is right. You haven’t changed a bit.”

“That’s not true. I’ve learned loads of things on the road. I can skip rocks now, so you can’t make fun of my arm anymore.”

“Oh, I’d never make fun of your horrendously poor finesse with pond stones.”

“Watch it,” she warns. He’s looking straight ahead instead of at her, but he thinks he hears a smile in her voice. “I’m a lot more lethal than I used to be. Even without my wand.”

“You were always deadly, Evans. Just of a different sort.”

They’re already at the camp, too surrounded by others, for Lily to properly respond. She just sort of leaves him with a shrug in response, taking a seat on the ground between Sirius and Meadowes, who she spends most of the evening engaged in conversation with instead of him. Still, though, James gets to eat with Sirius and Remus and Peter, spread out across the grass like equals, something new, old, familiar, good.

________________

Her hand’s at the hilt of her sword. Like usual. He wonders if she notices how often his eyes wander there, how often his eyes stay right there where her palm rests upon finely honed metal, easy, natural, unthinking. 

He wishes it could all be like that. Easy, natural, unthinking. Instead he finds so many things about now, about everything, about the world and about  _ her,  _ so uneasy, so unnatural, so full of too much thinking. Merlin, he’d left the Academy hoping to never have to think again, even though the world required so much of it. 

It’s a wonderful shame so much of his thinking is wrapped up around her these days. His mother would lecture him about dereliction of duty, but he thinks it would be worth her ire. (It would be worth a lot to see her again. That’s a different issue, a different story, a different saga with maybe a different necromancer).

But nights like these  _ do  _ feel easy, natural, unthinking. The 78th has been on with him for a few months now (a record by Moody’s standard allowances) and in that time have done more than finish out their tour of Hufflepuff and began the escort back home to the Hollows. That time has been long enough for her to burrow back under his skin in ways that feel old, good, familiar, and new, long enough for her to have sunk into his bones like those were her home, like every other love of his could be forgotten. Like everyone he’d met since knowing her those years ago had been a placeholder. And on nights like these when it’s only her on duty, only she and him lit in the low lamp light of his tent, he thinks maybe the rest could fall into place like this as well, easy and unthinking. Her head’s leaned against the wall, one knee tucked up to her chest, eyes closed. Dereliction of duty. He doesn’t care. 

Doesn’t care enough to report her to the head of the guard, that is. Not that he can’t tease her now.

“Sirius was right. I didn’t realize I’d become such a bore,” he says, smile pulling at the corner of his lips, still looking down at the treaty papers Dumbledore had sent to the council nearly a week ago. He looks up at her when he hears the clank of her metal indicating she’s shifted positions. “Many apologies. It’s been a while since I’ve started a good fire in my own tent.”

“Har, har,” Evans rolls her eyes, but the upward tilt to her lips tells a different story than the sarcasm she’d tried to insert into her tone. She looks at him now, lips not smiling or frowning, but her eyes are very bright. “Nothing personal, sir. Moody’s been running drills like he expects Eaters to come from all sides the moment one of us blinks. Just a bit tired.”

“Has he?” James asks curiously, glancing back down at his papers promising fair negotiations with only minor concessions to Eaters and their leader, promising an exchange of contraband wands for minimal political influence. “Guess he doesn’t have much faith in this nonsense. Smart man.” Then, looking back at her, adds, for the hundredth time, “Please don’t call me ‘sir.’”

Evans smiles. Smirks. Whatever it is, it’s a vicious thing, something he likes, something he wants to see and evoke more and more and more. 

“It’s protocol,  _ sir,”  _ she adds for emphasis. He can’t tell if it’s scathing or in good humor. He can’t tell which one he’d be more attracted to right now across the tent, her armor reflecting light back to him, making her glow. Their months of travel has been enough to endear him to her, but not the opposite. He should have seen this, predicted this inevitability. It’s always been like this between them. He remembers. 

Still, James pits her with a flat look, one that could combat both her ire and her entertainment. “Evans. We were in the same year in Academy.”

“But oh, Great Mage,” Evans responds with hearty, obvious sarcasm, her tone dripping with mock propriety, “If  _ I  _ do not pay you deference, who will?”

He looks down again, at papers and treaties and spell scrolls he doesn’t want to deal with and never had a choice, really, in dealing with them. 

“You know I never wanted this,” he says to the papers, talking to her. He musters what strength he can to look at her. Her eyes are still bright, but she isn’t smiling anymore. He’s sorry to see it go. “Surely you remember enough of me to know this isn’t what I wanted.”

He’s dug up old wounds, flicked scar tissue off both his skin and hers. Evans takes it like the champion she is, though, and doesn’t look away. They haven’t talk about the Academy in all the days and nights spent together in company again, probably because ten years ago is an age ago. They don’t talk about the years shared learning the same trade of tricks and arcane incantations before everything changed, before this war. Before his mother was murdered, before the magics were outlawed for anyone but the Mages. He’s talking about a time when James Potter and Lily Evans were competing for the top seat in the school, doing the same things, embracing the same wisdoms, before the world went to shit.

Back here in the present, her hand still rests gently upon the hilt of her sword. She doesn’t answer him immediately, but she doesn’t look away, either. 

“Your mother was a great Mage,” is what she decides to say after horrendously slow moments pass for him under her watchful eye. It isn’t an answer to his question and she knows it. “She was one of the reasons I could attend the Academy, you know.”

James looks at her with surprise. “I didn’t.”

Her smile this time is gentle. Wishful. That he does know, and that he also wants to evoke more after this small, bright moment. “She was. She funded my scholarship when she happened upon me performing cantrips for pennies in my village on a diplomatic trip.” And then the smile turns teasing, like she knows that’s what he needs right now. “I was supposed to perform new spells every year for her to renew the scholarship. Instead she took me to lunch and told me my grades were enough proof, especially whenever I beat you.”

James is smiling too. Something feels heavy in his throat, an old, fresh pain in one. Her jab, also old and fresh, makes it easier to swallow down, like she knew it would. “I had no idea.”

“Why would you?” Evans shrugs, metal clanking in response. “It wasn’t a public scholarship. And we weren’t exactly friends, Potter.”

He wants to correct her. He wants to say they were something, because he thinks they  _ were.  _ But their history is a shared one. He can’t control the narrative. He can’t change that the last time they saw one another was on a day both of them want to forget for obvious and non-obvious reasons alike.

_ I’m sorry we ended things where we did,  _ is what he wants to say.  _ I’m sorry I made you think I wasn’t serious, back then. I’m sorry he did what he did because of me.  _

Instead James asks what he feels is a safer thing to say, which is really saying something about how much he still fears the memory of her. 

“Do you miss magic?”

She closes her eyes and sighs, a sound that sounds ancient coming from her, desperately sad and desperately grieved. “Like you couldn’t imagine.”

He’s going to ask her more questions on what it’s like to be without a wand that chose her when she was a child, without a tool that helped them be more of themselves, but she can do the same thing he can, change the subject. This is a shared narrative. A shared present.

“This isn’t what you wanted,” Lily says, her eyes still very bright, and very serious. “I doubt it’s what she wanted for you, either. But you’re in the robes for a reason. That much I know.”

James looks at her.  _ Really  _ looks at her. He wants to know more of what she’s thinking, wants to know if she’s being honest with him. Wants to know more than that, like if anyone has burrowed under her skin, if she finds her home in someone else’s bones. Wants to know if she remembers him or cares at all or if she’s sorry for the way they left things, too. These aren’t things he can discover from her, not now in their shared present, not when he’s Mage, not when she wears his crest. 

James can’t ask her the things he wants to, so he doesn’t say anything at all. He turns his attention back to his papers, back to his duty. When moments turn to minutes that turn to even longer, he looks up to see that she’s got her head leaned back again, her eyes closed again, her hand on the hilt of her sword again. 

So little of the word is like this, easy, natural, unthinking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hm. dont know if i need to make it more clear in the time gap, but their all about 26 in this. decade from their last time together at 16. so its a decade from the fight at the lake dynamic.
> 
> here's my theme for this fic notes i think its gonna be picking out the sexiest element in each one of these plot loose aesthetic heavy moments and its fore sure the knife throwing.
> 
> posting the link to help hurricane laura survivors again, as the situation is, again, real bad: https://hurricanelaura-moreno.carrd.co/
> 
> i love y'all!!!! thanks for being as excited about lily with a sword as i am!!


	3. Persuaded and Disuaded

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> trigger warning: suicide mention

“Out of the question,” Frank Longbottom’s voice floats over the hill. “An absurd suggestion in the first place.”

“Maybe,” Moody mutters back, “But  _ you  _ tell him that, then, and see how well he takes it.”

“Even Potter can’t possibly think this is a good idea.”

“If Potter had any sense, we wouldn’t be carting about the wilderness, now, would we?”

Frank’s grimacing when he, Moody, and Alice clear the hill, heads bent in consultation. James meets them at the top of the clearing, noticing a woman standing at the bottom of the hill, looking up at him intently, her hands on the shoulders of the child standing in front of her gazing up the hill with open wonder.

“Hello,” James greets his guard cordially, drawing his eyes away from the woman and child. He regards his guard with abject curiosity, not bothering to pretend to not know they need something. 

Frank hands a scroll to him, already unfurled and read. Moody looks bored. Alice looks hopeful.

“A request,” Frank explains, standing at attention. Beside James, Sirius and Evans step up at attention as well. An order is in need, then. “From the village across the bank. They claim a creature has been upsetting local livestock, trampling in fields. Says one house got burned.”

“Alright,” James says pleasantly, eyes roving over the letter in his hands. “And when are we going to go down, then?”

“Sir, I think you should let the town guard handle it.”

“This is North Tower, right? With Sir Cadogan as magistrate? No wonder it’s gotten out of hand.”

“Then perhaps he needs more resources to fight the creature, but for you to address the issue would mean days spent tracking it, luring it out carefully—“

“Then we stay,” James shrugs his shoulders. “Where’s the rush, Longbottom? We’ve another month of this campaign. The Hollows aren’t going anywhere. We have time.”

“Maybe,” Frank cedes, sighing. “But it’s an unnecessary risk, outside of the scope of your responsibilities, and frankly beneath you to address—“

That’s when James makes up his mind, rolls up the scroll, tucks it into his robes, and strides down the hill to meet the woman and the girl at her side, who keeps pointing at different elements of the camp to her mother, who looks very used to and bored of this behavior. Sir Cadogan is a cad and a fraud, but he isn’t who wrote the letter. 

“Andromeda Tonks, I presume,” James greets, smiling warmly at the woman. She doesn’t smile back. James likes her immediately. He’s always liked stubborn women, always knew how to endear himself to them. “I hear you have a bit of a pest control issue going on.”

“A bit?” She raises her eyebrow dubiously. “If that’s what they told you to convince you, then yes, a bit, Mage.”

“How can I help?” 

And then Andromeda smiles at him, her severe features breaking into something more gentle. The girl holding her hand also smiles, teeth missing from her grin. Not from youth. James has the suspicion these teeth fell out in a tussle. He knows because that’s how he and Sirius lost half their adult set as kids; took his dad a month to find the right potion to grow them back. 

“Follow me, then. Your dogs can catch up.”

Looking back up the hill, James can see Sirius, Evans, and Alice halfway down. He gives them a jaunty salute, following closely behind Andromeda and her child. 

“I like your robes,” the girl says, twirling her head up to talk to him. She can’t be more than twelve; she should be at the Academy, if she had the magics, if the world weren’t shit. “I’ve only ever seen the Mage of Many Forms’ from afar. They’re pretty.”

“Thanks,” he smiles. “Do they make me look pretty? I’ve been trying to impress a pretty girl.”

“Hm. Enough,” she decides after some consideration. Then, “Do you have a sword?”

“No. Just a wand.”

“Boring.”

“So I’ve been told,” James can’t help his laugh. “But they have swords,” he knocks his head back towards his guard. “You can ask one of them for a lesson.”

Andromeda rolls her eyes, but James has seen mothers roll their eyes enough to recognize the affection in the action.The kid’s eyes are glowing when she looks back at the soldiers, uttering a single word.

“Wicked.”

***

He makes the party stay outside North Tower for the week it takes him to track and redirect the chimera that had caused so much havoc, all because Sir Cadogan has hosted a feast for the Founders far too close to her nursery. He doesn’t make anyone else endure the flames and attacks taken to help her back to her nest, either. Frank was right— their mission is to focus on contraband wands, Eaters, and their lich leader, not anything else. 

Still, he appreciates it very much when Remus decides that injuries endured while neglecting Eater investigations are still worth treating with every burn salve he applies on his back. James thinks the burns— and Sirius’ incessant mockery at his side— might be worth it all, because Lily Evans keeps popping in and out of the medical tent with anything ranging from Peter’s lunch to a particularly interesting looking weed for Remus to identify to idle updates for Sirius on Frank’s mood in the two days James needs to nurse his injuries.

His pride has taken no hit, despite the fact half the village saw him pinned on his back for an unimpressive display of magic until he got into his groove. He’d fight a hundred angry creatures to hear Lily Evans laugh next to Sirius, easy, natural, unthinking. 

________________

“Better,” Sirius says, hands on his hips, hair whipping in the wind. He turns to James, evidently pleased. That pleases James, widens the sharp grin on his face. “Better! I’d like to see you try on some real targets.”

He flips the knife in his hand before flinging it between two existing knives, symmetrical. A trick shot. 

“Impressive, I know,” James says, still the more pleased with himself. “But I think I’ll stick to my wand, all things considered.”

“Boring, again,” Sirius scoffs, plucking his good throwing knives from the straw dummy. “I used to be like you, James—“

“Don’t be hard on yourself, Sirius, you’re still good looking—“

“Useless without a wand,” Sirius interrupts him, narrowed at eyes at the interruption. “I mean, we made do in the Academy that time we’d lost ‘em in the Forest—“

“Godric, I  _ forgot  _ about that. What a bloody mess getting them back, fighting those ruddy plants with our  _ fists _ —“

“Exactly!” Sirius rolls up his sleeves. He’s off duty today (James, technically,  _ isn’t,  _ but he’s never off duty, so he’s calling this a lunch break) and opted out of leather armor in the late summer heat for just a linen shirt, sleeves rolled up to his forearms covered in scars he didn’t used to have, covering scars he used to hide. By his judgement, most of them seem to be blade related, but there’s a nasty bit of blackened skin that is evidence of a near mortal Eater curse. Sirius is still talking about the efficacy of learning more combat skills, but James’ attention is stuck on that scar on his forearm, on the thought that Sirius could be dead right now and maybe should be dead right now, stuck on the question of if anyone would have ever told him. And what he would have done to get him back.

“Oi,”’Sirius snaps in James’ face. “Don’t you think?”

“Sorry,” James blinks stupidly, willing away images of Sirius’ dead body in front of him. “Think what?”

“That you should come spar with us.”

“With Moody?”

“Godric, it’s like talking to the straw dummy,” he rolls his eyes. “With me and Evans. Peter’s fun too if you’re looking to wrestle. Or even just having Meadowes show you a decent way around a bow.”

“Oh.” James gives Sirius his full attention now, because he isn’t dead, he’s alive and asking him to have some fun again. He’d like that. He’d really, really like that getting to hang out with Sirius, with Lily, off duty more than they do now. “Yeah. Anytime. But you won’t convince me to give up my wand, you know. I’ve gotten a lot better at keeping it in my hands. Do you remember, I think this is after those plants tried to off us, that band of trolls? And we’d—“

Sirius gives a bark of a laugh. “Fuck, what a nightmare. I nearly had to tape my wand together—“

“I  _ did  _ have to, it was miserable. And—“

But their reminiscing is cut off, as it usually is. It’s so easy to get lost in the past, to make nostalgia his home, that he’s completely taken off guard by the sight of Marlene McKinnon running up to them, sweating, a disarray. 

“You have to come quickly— it’s the Longbottoms, their tent—“

There’s black smoke emanating from the captain’s quarters, the area kept up by Moody and the Longbottoms. 

Rushing into the tent, Sirius is already unsheathing his sword with McKinnon close behind. But it isn’t the carnage he feared, his heart up to his throat, his wand ready, a blasting spell already charging in his arm. What he finds instead is Lily Evans holding the tip of her sword to the nape of the neck of a man lying on the ground, his black robes and snake-like belt a mark of his station. Alice Longbottom is standing shaking, her pleasant and plump face paled when contrasted with the dark spot of decay at her collarbone, Frank standing next to her, also pale, also shaking, murmuring something low to his wife. Before James can move to inspect her injury, Remus and Peter also burst through the tent flaps. He breathes a sigh of relief, a short reprieve, as Remus starts his work at the cursed spot. 

Sirius is already bent down, pulling the mask off the Eater’s face. Evans’ sword is still resting against his neck, a threat. James notices  _ she  _ isn’t shaking. In the moment he watches her before turning his full attention to the Eater, he notices only one thing— fury. Cold, hard. Steady. 

“Godric,” James exclaims, recognizing the face of the boy at the same time Sirius does. He thinks  _ boy  _ because the Eater in front of him is younger than him by a few years. In fact, James had attended his coming of age feast a few years back, when his father was Governor in part of Slughorn’s domain of Slytherin. “That’s Crouch’s boy.”

He looks at Sirius. “Did you know he was an Eater?”

“No.” Sirius shakes his head, looks at James through his curtain of hair. “Never suspected, either.”

“His father isn’t going to believe you when you tell him,” Evans mutters quietly. “Crouch will do anything to save his reputation.”

James grimaces. She’s right, but that’s a problem for a little later. Right now he has questions on questions that need answering. 

“What’s happened to him?” James asks immediately, turning his head to the Longbottoms. Alice’s wound is still burning, but it looks better, and she’s barely wincing as Remus applies more poultice on it. It isn’t often he holds prisoners, but he typically likes them to be conscious.

“Knocked out cold,” Franks says, cradling his hand. He must’ve punched Crouch with enough force to break both his nose and his own hand. “It was the only way I could get him to stop casting without killing him.”

“Good man. Where’s his wand?”

“That’s the thing,” Frank’s face is very serious looking at James. Alice looks very white, an expression on her face just like her husband’s. “He doesn’t have one.”

James turns his full. attention away from Crouch for the first time, staring at the Longbottoms. “What do you mean?”

“It’s true, sir,” Alice nods. Her voice is very steady. He likes Alice a lot, has always admired her professionalism. “This isn’t our first encounter. I confiscated his wand and delivered it to the Head Mage myself two years ago.”

“He must have stolen a different one between now and then, like how he must have stolen one after Academy.”

“No.” She shakes her head with authority. “I saw him conjure with his bare hands, sir. Just now.”

“Impossible.”

“I swear it.”

Alice has no reason to lie to him; that much he knows. He likes Alice a lot, finds her a bit more levelheaded than her husband and partner, but that doesn’t make right now any easier. 

Children can perform wandless magic, little acts of altering the state of things. Wandless magic can’t do what Crouch did to the grass outside the tent, dead and burning, can’t do what he did to Alice’s skin, setting it rotting. 

“Alright,” James shrugs, his usual buffer. His brain, sharp as it was trained to be, can’t make sense of this without at least some input from the man of the hour. “Let’s ask our guest why and how he’s here and work from there, shall we?” Then, “Evans. I do need him to use his larynx. It’ll be harder to do if you end up poking him through.”

“Sit him up,” Frank orders, back to more of himself now that he’s got something to do. “Tie his hands behind his back, he needed them to cast. Mage, I suggest a magic ward if you aren’t going to gag him.”

“Good idea,” James nods, thanking Frank as if he weren’t going to just that, but he’ll give Frank this one. He deserves it, after all.

“Hello, Barty,” he greets Crouch pleasantly, sitting across from him, eye-level. He’s sitting cross-legged, Sirius standing at his right, Evans at his left, Frank and Alice standing cross-armed behind him. Moody watched the whole thing with his one good eye and two good hands clutched around his claymore behind Crouch.

Crouch’s eyes blink open slowly, groggily. 

“You might feel a bit sluggish,” James adds, equally pleasant. “Tends to happen after getting decked like you did. The truth serum I’ve poured down your throat should help clear your head a bit.”

Crouch ducks his head back down again. Pulls at his tied wrists behind his back, fights against the shackles holding him.

“You also won’t be able to conjure like you did before, seeing as you’re sitting in a blocking ward. Ready to talk?”

Crouch spits on him. Both Evans and Sirius shift at his side, metal armor screeching in displeasure. 

“Come on, Barty. It’s only been a few years since our last chat. You had a few more manners then.”

Crouch just tugs again at his restraints in response. 

“How’d you find this camp?”

“Followed you.”

“Did you come alone, or was anyone else with you?”

James watches him cough for a bit. He’d tried to swallow the truth. Eventually, Crouch mutters out a petulant, “Had others.”

“Who?”

More coughing. “The Lestranges.”

James raises his eyebrows up. The last thing he wants is for Bellatrix Lestrange to be lurking around here. Behind him, Alice complains, “We’ve  _ been  _ knowing the Lestranges are Eaters. This is useless.”

James holds up his hand to quiet her. “Are they still around, Barty?”

He gets satisfaction from the murderous look Crouch sets him with, can tell he can’t stand his name, his father’s name. He looks down in disgust at himself before answering James. 

“No. Left me to do the job.”

“Which was?”

“Finish my initiation.”

“By assassinating my captains?”

Crouch nods. “Was going to Turn them.”

“That’s some advanced arcana for an initiate, Barty. Frank says you don’t have a wand, even. Is that so?”

And then Crouch is smiling. It’s viscous, a mockery of the boy James met a few years ago, a mockery of pretty smiles everywhere. For the first time in this interrogation, Crouch’s eyes have a bit of life to them, his disgust with the Mage, disgust with himself, replaced by a feral sort of fervor. 

“You Mages are all the same,” Crouch says, eyes gleaming. “So afraid of the limits of magic that you’re too cowardly to be creative. To be  _ great.”  _

“Thanks for that truth,” James says, his voice hard. “But you didn’t answer the question.”

“I  _ did,”  _ Crouch corrects, his voice growing maniacal. “You are a dog chasing its tail, Potter, too stupid to see the utter futility of what you are doing. Too afraid to join the progress— the  _ future—  _ as it comes to you.”

James can sense the anger start to settle into his chest, feels his fists clenched around his wand, but his voice is infuriatingly mild when he says, “I’m not interested in your idea of the future, Barty. I’m interested in how a boy your age managed to conjure full curses without a wand.”

“The Dark Lord is full of wisdom,” Crouch answers, and James takes a deep breath to keep himself level headed. McGonagall would scold him for still being too hot headed for his own good, especially at a time like this, but Crouch is giving the circular answers of someone whose lost too much of himself to think in a logical progression. He continues confessing the truth as he knows it, speaking in a hushed tone. “He can see things you can’t begin to imagine, control magic itself, lord over life and death—“

“Yes, I know the spiel,” James interrupts. “And he’s learned to do so wandless, then. No telling what this hedenistic experimentation has done to him. And then he taught you?”

“ _ Personally,”  _ Crouch whispers with obvious reverence. Then he’s leaning towards James, his face very close to his. James doesn’t flinch. “The power is there, Mage, all around. Life and death are two sides of the same coin and it is yours to spend if you dare. I’ll teach you how to wield it myself.” Crouch’s whispers become increasingly grandiose. James doesn’t give him the reaction he knows he’s looking for, keeping his face ever still, ever neural, as Crouch goads on. “Don’t you want to be more than you are? Take what you can? Be lord of creation and destruction, free yourself from the conventions of everything you’ve been taught about magic?” 

And then, when James doesn’t respond, Crouch smiles even wider. “Don’t you want to see your mother again?”

Several things happen in a flash. James finds himself wielding his wand, but he isn’t the reason Crouch is winded, lying on his back with a vicious  _ oof.  _ That would have everything to do with Sirius’ foot on his neck, sword pointed down and dangerously close to Crouch’s chest. 

“Sirius,” James says sharply, standing up, reaching for his best friend’s shoulder. “Stand down. You aren’t helping.”

The look Sirius gives James over his shoulder, grey eyes shining through silky hair, is haunting. He hasn’t seen Sirius this angry in a decade. He’s forgotten what a recipe for disaster anger and impulse made inside his friend. James shakes Sirius’ shoulder, feeling his chest heave with furious breaths. 

“Leave him.”

And Sirius does take his foot off Crouch’s neck, removes his sword. Spits on Crouch. 

“Keep her name out of your mouth,” Sirius mutters before taking his place back next to Evans, who shifts to stand a little closer to him. A comfort. Close. Anytime he sees them, they’re close. . 

The tension in the tent is thick enough to make it difficult to breath around it, think around it. James knows he’s lost this conversation a long time ago. James just straightens his robes out, smoothing out the maroon mark of his station in an effort to reestablish his cool demeanor. 

“That power isn’t mine to claim,” he tells Crouch sternly, like he could be the final word. “To interfere in the natural way of things will never be mine to claim. Nor is this power Voldemort’s to control.” 

Crouch starts to laugh, still in his back on the ground, wheezing. It’s unpleasant, ringing in his ears, with Crouch screaming, “But it is! It is! It is!”

And then he’s just laughing. Laughing. James knows he isn’t going to get another answer out of him, not like this. Laughing like the lich does, laughter that James knows was the last thing his mother heard before she died.

Even in the refuge of his own Mage’s tent, the one that used to belong to his mother, he can’t get the sound of laughter out of his ears. 

***

“I’ve been thinking,” James turns on his heel, greeting Moody as he walks through the tent threshold. He’s reviewing what he’d written for the council, doesn’t sit right with him. “I don’t think we should transfer him. I think Dumbledore needs to come here himself, see the damage, talk to Crouch.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” Moody grunts, pulling out his flask. That’s never been followed by good news. “Wouldn’t matter two flying shits.” 

James sets down his report. Looks wearily at Moody’s flask, now extended out to him. “Why’s that?”

“He’s dead.”

“I’m sorry,” James says politely, staring at Moody. He usually doesn’t joke like this. James would be thrilled to learn that Moody’s discovered what humor is if it didn’t come with such poor timing. “He’s what?”

“Dead,” Moody croaks, takes another sip from his hip flask when James didn’t take up his offer. He’s too busy blinking at Moody in shock. 

“How did… was it one of ours?” He closes his eyes in horror, thinking about who he’s going to have to fire and charge with murder, thinking about who has ruined the Mages’ chances. Thinks about who he’d pardon, in the end. Lily’s eyes, filled with rage, come into his mind then. Sirius. Alice, Frank. “Who killed him?” 

“He did it himself. Black said he asked for water and the next thing he was convulsing on the ground.” Moody takes another sip from his hip flask. “Pettigrew  _ and  _ Longbottom checked Black’s skein and confirmed it was just water, nothing exciting. Evans even drank from it to prove it.” Moody pauses, takes another swig from his flask. “Lupin thinks Crouch cursed the water once it hit his tongue. Fucking  _ bollocks.” _

James collapses in a heap on his chair in front his desk. Looks at his now not only inaccurate but completely irrelevant report to Dumbledore. Thinks about how any crucial turning point they had in the war just slipped through his fingers. 

“Fucking bullocks,” he swears, adding even more under his breath as he pulls out the crystal glass in the bottom drawer of his desk for occasions such as this. Runs his hand through his hair. Swears again, shoves his glass towards Moody, now sitting in front of him. “Be generous, Moody. For the death of both our reputations.”

***

He’s written a  _ new  _ full report to Dumbledore— longer than he thought himself capable of during his first draft, which simply read,  _ “We’re fucked. Cheers.” _

The report sent to the Council of Nine does remain simple. His findings, the end result. Concludes with him taking responsibility for letting the first decent clue they had to the way Eaters operate fall through his fingers, slippery as the snakes they send as their first wave in an attack. 

That’s what it boiled down to, right? By a stroke of pure fucking  _ luck  _ he still has his guard captains, by their skill and  _ not _ his they subdued and Eater, and when it came to James’ one job, he got jack shit out of Crouch. And then, by either bad luck or incompetence— he hadn’t decided which one— that vital clue they had to the war and the world is dead under his watch. 

So maybe he  _ is  _ in a horrendous mood and maybe he knows this is unbefitting for him, but he’s stuck I n this foul pit of a mood he managed to think himself into. And maybe he’s more like Sirius than he remembers allowing himself to be, because his first instinct is to sneak out his tent well into the morning hours of the night and just throw knife after knife after knife until the world makes sense again. 

But of course she would find him, there at the target site. Of course she would prolong the amount of time it’ll take for the world to make sense again. Of course she would find him, because so little of the world makes sense anymore.

He pretends he doesn’t see her. Pretends that Lily Evans in a linen tunic and commoner’s pants isn’t something new for him to process, pretends that he can stay like this, silently fuming, for the hours he needs to himself. He pretends like this doesn’t feel familiar, pretends like he is new to the sensation of being stared down by Lily Evans throwing similar daggers to the ones in his hand with only her narrowed, critical gaze. He pretends this isn’t new, how ready he is to be angry at her instead of at himself, be angry at her instead of the world. Pretends she isn’t doing the same.

They’ve become more patient in the last decade. That, or more stubborn. It’s an hour before she breaks the silence between them. 

“Did you know that was possible?” Evans asks, more than curiosity in her voice. Accusation. “To conjure advanced magic without a wand.”

He throws a knife, not facing her. She’s watching his back from that same barrel she watched him weeks ago on, when things seemed simpler, easy, natural, unthinking. 

The knife hits. Another thud. “You heard what I told Alice.”

“And you weren’t lying?”

This time he looks at her, after his last knife lands. She’s looking at him with an expression that matches her tone, hard. James narrows his eyes at her, obviously still frustrated. “Of course I’m not lying, Evans. Why would I keep something as important as that secret?”

“It’s a reasonable question, Potter,” she shrugs. “How am I supposed to know what games you Mages play in this war?”

“I don’t play games,” he says stiffly, once he’d gone to retrieve the knives out from the dummy Eater. The arcane isn’t a game.  _ War  _ isn’t a game. The look he gives her is a sharp reprimand that she doesn’t flinch from when he repeats, still angry, “I don’t play games.”

She ignores the warning in his voice that he’s in no mood to play  _ this  _ game with her, the one they’ve played before, where she pokes his buttons and he’ll light her fuse and it’s a race to see which one of them blows first. He goes back to throwing the next knife in his lineup. As much as this feels old and familiar, he doesn’t  _ want  _ to take his confusion, agitation, out in her. But if she’s going to goad him on like she insists on doing then, well. So be it. 

“ _ Someone  _ must have known this was possible. How else have Easter forces been multiplying faster than wands could be manufactured? You’re really telling me Dumbledore never suspected?”

The next knife hits the Eater square between the eyes. As if he would ever know what Dumbledore  _ suspected.  _ He barely knows what Dumbledore knows, let alone speculates. “No.”

Even he hears the doubt in his voice, but it’s hard to keep out. He’s the youngest Mage and the others still treat him that way, as some kid with too many ideas that won’t work for this many reasons. Sometimes he still feels like a kid in McGonagall’s Academy classroom, sometimes he feels every bit as small as that smarmy bastard Malfoy made him feel in combat training, sometimes he’s afraid he’ll turn into Slughorn and only ever live for his comforts and connections. Maybe he’ll turn into Dumbledore, surrounded by others but alone in the world with only secrets for friends. 

He throws another knife at the dummy. Pretends it’s the Council. Pretends it’s him, sitting smug, forgetting who he is. 

“So that’s it, then,” Lily says again when he ran out of daggers to throw, retrieved them again. The cycle starting again. “You’ll write your report to the Council and keep that information amongst yourselves and not act like today changed everything.”

“We don’t know enough to know things changed,” James lies through gritted teeth. Of course today changed everything. Is he already Dumbledore with only secrets for friends? She doesn’t give him time to consider this inevitability. 

“Bullshit, Potter. What Crouch told you was more than enough to know we don’t know a single thing we thought we did.”

“He died on your watch, Evans,” James spins around, marching up to her, closer than he’s allowed himself to be next to her in the months of her service. He isn’t in his Mage’s garb. The spin is less dramatic for it, just him in his own linen shirt and commoner’s pants. Almost just like her. Godric Gryffindor, what he wouldn’t give to be just like her. “We don’t know enough about those changes because he’s dead. Don’t blame  _ me  _ for that.”

Her eyes are venomous slits. “It wasn’t on  _ my  _ watch. McKinnon was there, too. Half your advanced guard was in that tent.”

“Funny he’s dead, then.”

“Honestly, Potter,  _ this  _ is why Sirius is sulking and hiding with a bottle of mead.” Suddenly she’s standing, nearly jumping off her barrel to stand toe to toe with him, her arms crossed over her chest. They haven’t changed a bit. Her voice is harsh, accusation in full force, indignation dripping off her words in globs of righteousness. “He knew you’d react just like this, angry at us for absolutely no reason. Crouch is dead because of magic  _ none  _ of us knew was possible. I only have half my arcanist's education, but you— you got the full thing and more and still didn’t think to see this as possible.  _ Don’t  _ blame me for not understanding complications in the arcane, or divine, or whatever he did.”

Then she walks away. With a final scoff full of loathing, she tears her gaze from his, turning on her heel to head back to her quarters. Maybe that’s where Sirius is sulking, he doesn’t know. He didn’t register how angry he was at Sirius until she said so. He didn’t realize it wasn’t fair until she said so. 

He’s still angry, anyway. Still upset. He’s still an idiot when it comes to Lily Evans. 

“It’s not like we can recreate what Crouch did, anyway,” he says to her retreating back, his arms crossed over his chest like hers had been. His words, the edge to his tone, is enough to stop her walking. He knows she’s listening. “We can’t learn anything from him.”

She turns to face him. “He’s done advanced wandless magic. You think we can’t learn anything from that?”

“He learned it all from Voldemort.”

“I know. I heard him.”

“So it’s a dead end, anyway.”

Evans hesitates. “Not necessarily.”

His eyebrows shoot up. “Not necessarily?”

“Not necessarily!” She literally digs her heel into the ground. “Crouch said it was experimental. He implied there were other methods—“

“He did  _ not,”  _ James cuts her off, striding back over to her. This time, he  _ is  _ reminded of their respective stations. “He said it was about lording over destruction. There is  _ nothing  _ to be learned from Eaters.”

“But we could—“ 

“End of discussion, Evans,” he bites out. He knows how temptation works, from her and other sources of power. It’s a road he won’t walk down, not tonight, not even with her. 

She must sense it’s a nonstarter. She must see that the fight in his eyes isn’t something she could win, not like this, not like they are. So she throws a different weapon at him, daggers disguised as surrender. 

“Fine. Sorry a wandless nobody like me cared about the arcane again. I should have known better.”

When she moves to walk away again, he permits himself this one thing. He lets himself grab the sleeve of her forearm, gently. Genuinely. 

“You aren’t a nobody,” he starts, knowing that wasn’t her point but unable to drop it. “Don’t say that about yourself.”

Before she can respond, staring at him unblinkingly, he drops his hand from her. Runs it through his hair. 

“Fuck, Evans, I don’t know,” he whispers harshly. “I don’t fucking know anything, alright? I don’t know how Crouch did what he did and I don’t know when you’ll be allowed a wand again. I just don’t fucking know.” She’s still looking at him, hasn’t walked away. He keeps going. “What I do know is that we aren’t going to do anything that the Eaters are doing. If they think it’s good, it isn’t. Plain and simple.”

He watches her take a few deep breaths in, her nostrils flaring with the movement, broad shoulders moving up and down with the effort. He hopes she understands him. He hopes she knows him. 

“Alright,” is what Evans says after heavy, heavy silent moments passed between them. Her voice is very even. Her face is expressionless. “Alright.”

He goes back to throwing after those heavy moments pass. He goes back to throwing his knives (Sirius’ knives) in silence, her sitting on that barrel, watching him. These throws are less of an effort. The  _ thuds  _ against the dummy mock him a little less. It’s not that he isn’t lost or confused, it’s just that, well. Maybe he feels better for talking to her, disastrous as it was. And that’s dangerous.

He isn’t sure when she leaves him, slipping out from his awareness like a ghost. All he knows is that eventually he’s alone, only the noise of the knives hitting the Eater as his company. Nothing easy, nothing natural, nothing unthinking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay! i think i figured it out! i think this is going to be a part one/part two situation for uploads and i have learned i have no control. THATS why i usually write the whole thing first or if its going to be this long (i'd wager, 50k-75k) then post it all at once. SO you'll get what i have then there'll probably be a short hiatus for part two (you'll know when it comes. things will Happen).
> 
> also. if there are any frank longbottom stans out there im sorry somehow my characterization of him in my head shifted to him being a total dick recently when i sat down and thought about augusta longbottom for too long. she's recently been added to my hit list. 
> 
> i've linked the okra project before but im doing it again because its important to do mutual aid!:https://www.theokraproject.com/
> 
> AND i forgot to originally say whats the sexiest aesthetic element this chapter and its for sure james not liking frank longbottom.  
> im sorry. thats mean. its lily and james both not wearing the garb of their stations and fighting like maybe theyre equals like they used to be. wish i could make a poll for this


	4. Things Unknown, Things Rediscovered

Close. Anytime he sees them, they’re close. 

That’s what he’s starting to notice more and more these days as they draw nearer to the Hollows, where he fears his regiment may change, where he fears that a return home might be the same return to empty halls and empty tables. He fears he’s been on borrowed time as it is, which is one reason why he apologizes to Sirius the very next day after he talked to Evans, finding him looking, for once, a little worse for wear over a plate of eggs and fried bits of meat. He won’t let another exit be like his first one; he won’t leave on bad terms with too many things spoken and unspoken.

Sirius grunts out something that must mean good morning when James, back in his Mage’s robes, plops down next to him. Sirius could always be relied upon to sulk alone. 

“I’m sorry,” James says, before Sirius can open his mouth to maybe apologize for something that was never his fault, giving a prisoner water, something that was never his fault, not predicting what Crouch could do. 

“I  _ was  _ upset yesterday, disgustingly so. I’m sorry that I let myself be upset at you.”

Sirius, for his part, drags his eyes up from his plate to look at James, still poking morosely over his dish. “I don’t blame you. I’m fucking pissed at my bloody self. I didn’t know he’d go and  _ die.” _

“I know,” James says low, knowing Sirius, knowing he doesn’t like other people hearing him be uncertain, doesn’t like the idea of others thinking he’s anything but a good man with a good aim. “It’s not your fault. If anything, it’s mine, but what’s done is done. We know better for the next time.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Sirius mutters darkly, no longer poking at his food. “No Eater is going to pull one over me like that again. They aren’t going to get the chance.”

That was about the last time he really saw Sirius alone, aside from those few and lucky nights Sirius sits as guard to his tent, their conversations jumping from thought to insignificant thought, except for the question James really wants to ask Sirius. 

He isn’t sure if it’s a change, or if it’s just something he hadn’t noticed before, but he really starts to notice this— that they’re close, whenever he sees them. Sitting off to the sides at mealtimes, heads pushed closed together, whispering. Sometimes dozing off under the same tree after Moody’s drills. The dozing off might be explained by the most troubling part of it all, the part that makes James the most upset at himself, the most riddled with guilt. Most riddled with something else he doesn’t want to name.

It’s just that some nights, nights he spends strolling the camp unaccompanied, nights he spends walking the nearby wilderness when he should be asleep, nights he treasures because he used to sneak around when he was young and doing it again on such a small scale was one of his few comforts in his early days as Mage, he notices them together. Together, like usual. But on the nights he’s wandering alone, noticing them together is more than the simple observation that they’re close (Close. Any time he sees them, they’re close). On these nights he sees them also sneaking around camp and something’s different, like the unmistakable spring in her step, the glow on her face in the moonlight, the way her smile, her walk back to camp, radiates energy out like it was thunder and lightning in one. The way Sirius the next day seems younger, seems less weary of the world, open and lively with more than just him or Remus or Peter.

It’s something that pulls at his heart in the most unexpected ways. It’s something that makes him think he doesn’t know his old friends, no matter how easy it was to remember them. Because he thought Sirius was still Sirius, uninterested in anything other than the next time they were sneaking out the school. He thought she was still Evans, who at the end of the day always knew  _ him,  _ always paid attention to  _ him,  _ even when she claimed he wasn’t worth her time. But they aren’t. Of course they aren’t. It’s been ten years and he thought nothing was different, not really, but  _ this  _ between  _ them  _ is different. New. Unfamiliar. Good, he guesses.

It’s something that reminds him he is alone. It’s something that reminds him he is Mage, not one of them, long lived, indisposable, alone. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> surprise double update !
> 
> i hope y'all are enjoying this!! i really am!!
> 
> sexiest aesthetic moment is sirius saying he's just going to kill eaters on sight


	5. Hot, Cold, Hot Again

His tea is going to go cold. That’s what he thinks right now, of all things. That his tea will go cold. 

They’re only a few days' ride away from the Hollow, blessed in their journey by monotonous days spent riding south, blessed to not be disturbed by any Eater (wandless or not). 

Monotonous days without Eaters or signs of the lich didn’t make the final leg of their journey peaceful— things are never quite  _ that _ good, and James is never quite willing to be  _ that  _ bored, not anymore, not since everyone came back. Moody became the most recent victim to his stubborn streak when James mapped their final route to pass near the abbey instead of detouring the place all together, as Frank had suggested.  _ For his safety.  _ Frank hadn’t been around long enough to realize that phrase was the fastest way to make him disagreeable. 

“Godric’s Men have always been a nuisance, but never a bother,” James consoled Moody, who was grumbling something awful about needing increased security measures. “I’ve  _ been  _ to their abbey. Remember? Last winter? That awful roasted pig? No one tried to off me at dinner beyond attempting to bore me to death with tales of the Old Days.”

“That was last winter, boy.” Moody shakes his head at James, glowering. His guard captain must really be irked to call him  _ boy.  _ James wants to smile. That’s what he used to grunt in displeasure whenever he snuck into his mother’s meetings. Back then, Moody could basically toss him out with the scruff of his neck. Then it became a game to him and maybe to Moody, too. This Moody, the one missing an eye, narrows his one good one at James. “Intel says they’re radicalizing faster than ever.”

“I’m glad they found something to do besides their prayers, then.”

“I’m worried it’ll be seen as a taunt after you declined the High Priest’s formal request for an audience,” Moody adds on relentlessly, fighting a losing battle. “ _ Again.”  _

“High Priest Doge doesn’t want an audience with me,” James rolls his eyes. “Doge wants to berate me for not being Gryffindor incarnate. I’ve saved us both some time. Besides,” James taunts lightly, knowing how to get under his skin. “ You’re losing your touch if you’re afraid of a few scrawny fanatics, Mad-Eye. Worried they’ve found a way to master combat in between scribing Godric Gryffindor’s journals ad infinitem?”

Moody ignores the goad, just grabs his sword again, making his armor jostle about as he leaves James’ tent. “Constant vigilance, Mage. That’s what keeps us going.”

“Sure,” James shrugs, going back to his letters. “Constant vigilance. I’ve got it. I’m vigilant.”

“Like hell,” Moody says as the tent closes behind him. 

So, maybe, just maybe, James should have predicted this— one of Godric’s Men standing here, pissing the hell out the whole camp— and maybe, just maybe, he owes both Frank and Moody a pathetic, groveling apology. And raise, too, probably. 

“You have a duty!” Shouts the cleric, standing in the middle of the camp of all places, pointing directly at him with an accusatory finger. James doesn’t recognize him from his visit last winter; he’s young but in the full regalia of the most devout of Godric’s Men, golden shimmering robes flowing around him. “A duty to revive the magics back to their purest form! I beseech you, Mage, as Men have done before me. Abandon the arcane to its weakened state and do what you were born to do! Restore the divine!” 

“For the last time,” James sighs, thinking he really should get more credit for being able to resist rolling his eyes, even if he  _ did  _ welcome this trouble. “I have no control of the divine. Petition Godric for it, not me.”

They shouldn’t be having this discussion out here in the middle of the encampment. The cleric shouldn’t even  _ be  _ here within the borders of their camp, but he is, and James isn’t sure how or why he is making so public what should be a moot discussion of the art of arcana versus the holy influence of the divine stemming directly from the Founders. It is a moot discussion on James’ role in the issue, too, moot for decades and centuries now. 

James doesn’t have a lot of patience for Godric’s Men on the best of days. It’s not fair, when one really sits and thinks about it, that the Helpers of Helga are all so damned agreeable and charitable and the Acolytes of the Lady are glorified librarians while  _ he  _ gets stuck dealing with the most dogmatic of the Followers. (He’s even envious of the Sect of Salazar, who’re nothing more than a political pact. Politics he  _ gets  _ even though he despises, certainly understands and can maneuver in far more than radical traditionalists). 

James doesn’t have a lot of patience for Godric’s Men on the best of days, but he had only popped out of his tent to grab an extra biscuit from the kitchens and left his tea with his papers, scrolls, letters exposed inside his tent, now blocked by the cleric. James doesn’t have a lot of patience for Godric’s Men on the best of days and this is  _ not  _ a best of days sort of day, this is another morning where he woke up after another restless night of impossibly hopeful and disastrously impossible thoughts and dreams for himself, another morning following a night of talking himself out of believing his perfectly accurate suspicions and another night of berating himself for his own cowardice, duplicity. 

Anyway. Right now, the cleric still seems like a lower-rung problem for his mind to puzzle out, even though he’s yelling in the courtyard and his other problems are much quieter about it. 

“You continue to focus your energies in the wrong domain, Mage!” At his sides, the cleric’s fist is clenched, but shaking. Maybe out of anger, maybe out of fervor, maybe out of fear. Maybe a combination. “Do as Godric promised us you will do, the work you were  _ destined  _ to do!”

“ _ Don’t  _ start with that again,” James  _ does  _ roll his eyes this time, but he can’t help it. He’s been through this spiel too many times. He thinks he’s allowed this one eyeroll.

James is aware that a small crowd has gathered here, mostly his guard, who registers the threat and seem to tense in unison. James holds up his hands then, wandless. It’s a request for them to leave the de-escalation to him, because he’s the diplomat, he’s supposed to be the one for peace and unity, he’s supposed to be the one to handle these exact situations like how Dumbledore and McGonagall trained him to. He regrets the eye roll. Attempts something more mild. “I’m sorry you see it that way, but—“

The cleric steps forward just a step, still shaking, still with his voice raised and his chin held high. Still between James and his diplomat’s tent. The guard around him steps forward a step. Behind him, hears a sword unsheathe. He hears a voice, near his ear.

“Sir, step back.” Evans.

The cleric takes another step. So does the guard. She’s right behind him. He can sense her. “You must know divine shall rise again, with or without you!”

Evans is beyond whispering now, unmistakable warning and reprimand in her tone because she knows him. Because he didn’t step back when she said so, because he actually took a step closer to the cleric, too.

“ _ Mage,  _ step  _ back!” _

Well. Maybe he would have listened to her if the cleric hadn’t looked him in the eye just then, expression absolutely gleaming with undeserved authority. 

“Your parents were also proud to the point of arrogance,” he says next, stupid glittering robes billowing behind him, no longer yelling. The glint in his eye tells James this is the cleric’s last card to play, and he plays it well. “Maybe they’d still be alive if their pride had not prevented them from listening to us then. Maybe you’ll —”

“I’ve had enough of this,” James shakes his head, stepping forward, ignoring Evans behind him, trying to ignore the growing red around his vision and the twitch in his hand itching to reach for his wand. He wants to be in his tent, where his tea is waiting, where he can think bitterly about all the ways his parents left him with all this crap in peace. 

James strides into the clearing, steps past the cleric, waving up his hand behind him in clear dismissal. “You’re wasting my time and yours. Tell High Priest Doge that I’ll—“

What he hears behind him is the clang of metal armor moving, a grunt, a swear, a frustrated scream. What he turns around to see is the cleric on the ground, cradling a bleeding arm to his chest, Moody standing over him, sword at his neck, Meadowes and the Longbottoms surrounding him, and Lily Evans standing where she had been behind him, sword in hand with blood where she struck the cleric.

Lily Evans, who has a knife sticking out of her collarbone, poked clear through her simple leather armor. 

A knife that would have—  _ should have—  _ gone through his back to his heart instead. 

Nothing really makes sense after that thought enters his head, a horrifying sort of halt to his thoughts, while the rest of the world moves speedily around him.

“Oh, blistering fuck,” Moody yells, “Shut him up!”

“The old way shall return! The New Days will begin! ” The cleric yells again, and again, and again, even though Frank is holding him up and Alice is putting locks on his wrists. “Repent to the Founders! Remember the divine!”

James can’t even really hear anything or see anything besides Lily sort of sway on her feet, drop her sword, stare down at the knife hilt, her face a white grimace. If she’d been any taller, it would have gone through  _ her  _ heart.

“Lily—!”

That’s all he can get out before the next level of chaos unfurls, Moody yelling out orders faster than James can move on his feet. 

“Blast it all— Black, get Evans to medical. Vance, take McKinnon and Dearborn and secure the perimeter, I don’t want any more of them anywhere near camp. Take him to my tent. And you, Potter,” Mad-Eye turns his full anger to him. “A chat. Later.”

Sirius has one of Evans’ arms slung over his shoulder, trying to be both gentle and speedy getting her to Remus or Peter or whoever is on duty today. 

Duty. Sirius is in full plate armor. Evans in leather. She wasn’t even on duty. 

James finds his feet moving, finds his voice again. 

“Let me help—“

The look Sirius gives over his shoulder is dark. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?”

And then it’s just James, standing alone, his path to his tent finally clear. 

***

Well, he was right. His tea is cold as death and just as appetizing. He drinks it anyway, thinking he might just deserve it, when he finally works up the courage to trek the small distance from his tent to the medical tent, incident report complete and sent to Dumbledore. Humiliating, well-deserved lecture from Moody about personal safety and  _ Constant vigilance, Potter! Constant! Vigilance!  _ over.

Her back is to him when he pushes the curtains to the medical tent aside. She’s sitting up on a table, her linen shirt ripped open all the way down the back for Remus to work with, pale freckled skin exposed to the dim, shifting candlelight. Remus seems to be wrapping things up, putting his used rags into the laundry bin while Peter reorganizes vials in their traveling basket for later use. 

James hovers in the entranceway for more than a moment. He feels like he’s stumbled onto something intimate, seeing the four of them operate silently in this way of familiarity. And then there’s Sirius, sitting in front of Lily, talking in low tones just for her to hear, unconcerned for Remus and Peter in the background. Unconcerned, too, for the fact that she’s wearing only her chest wrap and the bandages wrapped around her shoulder to stabilize the wound (the wound he gave her). James has to look away from Sirius looking at Lily. It would be one thing to feel the way he does for any technical subordinate of his; one thing to feel the way he does for any person whose heart is already promised, but that he is jealous of his friends is another, far more shameful thing. They don’t know how he feels— they  _ can’t  _ know— but he cannot help the feeling that he’s betrayed them, his heart and loyalty split running in two dialectically opposed fashions. 

That’s guilt he’ll have to reason out another time. He’s got enough on his heart right now, weighing down his shoulders, needing relief. James strides into the medical tent, maroon robes brushing the ground, giving him away with each step as Remus, Peter, and Sirius’s heads all snap up to find him.

“Hello, Mage,” Remus greets him evenly, stoic expression on his face. Beside him, James sees Lily’s shoulders tense outside her wrappings, notable and noteworthy muscles out like a warning. 

“I don’t want to intrude,” James says, holding his hands up in apology. “I just came to… you know. Check on things.”

“Right,” Remus nods, looking at him a little too keenly. “Check on things.”

“In private?” James winces at how uncertain his voice sounded. Great Mage, One of Nine, Last of His Line, can’t even muster the authority in his voice to ask to be alone with Lily Evans in front of his friends.  But friends of his they are, so Remus shrugs and says, “I was just cleaning up, anyway. You are  _ off _ of any physical duty until I say so, understood? Be ready to rest for a few weeks.”

The last bit he says to Evans, not to him, and she just sighs in response. 

“He’s already told Moody, Lily,” Peter adds with an amused smile directed at her, “So you can’t lie your way into training again.”

James is pretty sure he hears the word  _ traitor  _ slip out of her mouth in a bitter tone, but she’s still turned away from him, so he isn’t positive. Remus smiles in response, gives her a consoling pat on her knee, before walking out with Peter, who smiles encouragingly at James. 

All that’s left is Sirius, who hasn’t really looked at James since he walked in, whose attention is still on Lily, still there sitting before her. Sirius raises his eyebrows at Lily and receives some sort of communication from her in response before standing.

“I’ll be outside,” Sirius tells Lily before tussling her hair easily, familiarly, affectionately in departure. When he passes by James, though, he gives him a sympathetic clap on the shoulder that James appreciates after he swallows down the little bit of jealousy rising up in his throat like bile. 

Alone now, Lily finally speaks to him, turning her head so that she can look at him, so that she can deliver her rage with the full brunt of her eyes, narrowed in anger. Beyond being angry, he notices they’re also red and swollen, like she’d been crying, and he feels even worse than he would if she would have only been righteously pissed at him. 

“You are a  _ horrible  _ charge, do you know that?” 

James winces, sets the awful tea he deserves down at the table with her. “I’ve been told once or twice.”

“Well I’m telling you again. I don’t get paid enough for a lot of things, and keeping you where you were ordered to be certainly makes that list.”

What’s surprising is the flood of relief cursing through him; she’s talking to him like they used to, picking at him like they used to all those years ago. Maybe she remembers when he was James and she was Lily, and they could be like this, too honest and too human with one another. She’s turned on the table, facing him, legs dangling off the edges, her good arm supporting her, fingers curled round the ledge. Remus has done a neat job of packing and wrapping her wound, one arm taped to her body so as to not stretch the skin there. Surely James’ eyes linger there at her shoulder, her exposed collarbone, trace up her neck, to make sure the rest of her is intact and for no other reason. When his eyes land on her face (took too long to get there, he knows that, he knows,  _ he knows _ ), her gaze is steady back at his. She could hurl insults at him all night and he’d let her. He has before. 

“I’m sorry,” James confesses, running his hand through his hair. He’s played this game with her in their youth, remembers the steps, remembers the dance, muscle memory. He skips to the end; there is no sense wasting her time, especially when she’s right. “I was an ass. I can’t  _ stand  _ those men, I’ve never trusted them, but I never thought one was capable of actually making good on his threats. I miscalculated.” He sits on the stool Remus left, a little more level with her. She’s taller than him now, broad shouldered and proud despite her immobile arm, despite the red in her eyes. She doesn’t say anything, then, just keeps looking at him. He leans just a little bit closer to her, incrementally, can’t help himself. Remembers his mother warning him about playing with fire, but he wants her to believe him, wants her to forgive him, wants  _ her,  _ and it’s all so selfish of him, really. His voice is quiet, serious, rough, when he whispers now, “I was an ass and you got hurt.”

“Barely,” she scoffs. “Shallow blade. Didn’t even hurt.”

James is fairly certain she can accurately assess the  _ Really, Evans?  _ from his quipped brow, can tell she won’t admit that she was crying. So she just sighs again, leans back on the table, looks back at him with a measured gaze. 

“You  _ are  _ an ass,” she declares. Maybe there’s a smile he hears in her voice, a begrudging sort of teasing tone. “Don’t use past tense.”

“Alright,” he smiles too, hoping to coax more of that out of her. “I  _ am _ an ass. And I  _ am  _ sorry.” 

Now she’s the one with a quipped eyebrow, making several connections in her brain at once. Always a quick thinker, always able to see right through him.

“You aren’t sorry you disobeyed Moody— or me,” she observes. “You’re sorry there were consequences for your insolence. Stubbornness. Whatever you want to call it.”

James hesitates for a moment, deciding his answer, but what’s the point in lying? She could always tell his lies from his truths, an annoying, special, enduring and endearing character trait of hers. 

Still, he finds it hard to look her in the eye when he mutters, “It was a bad order.”

“Was  _ not,”  _ she corrects. Then, an afterthought, adds, “Sir.”

It’s his turn to scoff this time, and her turn to hit him with a look that says,  _ Really, Potter?,  _ her turn to wait while he sighs, fixes his gaze on some point past her shoulder. Can’t look her in the eye, can't look at the wound open to accuse him of his crime. 

“I’m tired of this war,” James says. His voice comes out in whisper, deeper, quieter, harsher than expected. More emotion than expected. He clenches his fists, tugs at the velvet robe draping over his kneecaps. “I’m tired of this charade. I’m tired of being treated like I’m indispensable while everyone else isn’t.” He forces himself to look at her (No, he doesn’t. His eyes flick to hers, involuntary, seeking comfort, seeking approval, seeking understanding,  _ anything _ from her, because he thinks maybe he’d feel better about himself if she thought better of him. A silly, desperate, immoral thought, need, desire). James looks at her steadily, unclenches his fists on his lap, runs one hand through his hair, looks back at her. “It was a bad order because if he was going to kill, he should have killed me. Not you, not anyone else. Me. No one else gets to die for me.”

“That is our job, Potter,” Lily says gently, consolingly, which works on him for a moment, comforts him in that moment, which is dangerous, really. “Everyone of us signed up to do just that.”

“Well, it’s bullshit!” James cuts her off, standing up, robes swishing, anger flaring. “It’s horrible, like this stupid robe means anything, like what happens to you isn’t— is less important—”

“Stop,” she cuts him off in the same consoling tone as before. “Think. I know it’s awful, but—”

“You can’t begin to understand the  _ guilt _ —”

“I can,” Lily interrupts again, her voice soft, but firm. “Potter. I can.”

Something about the way she says it, about the conviction resting in her voice, the sad, sullen way she looks at him now, makes him believe her. At the very least, it makes him shut up long enough for Evans to pit him with another look like before.

“Finished throwing your fit?”

James crosses his arms, scoffs, kicks a bucket underneath the table. “Yes.”  _ No.  _

When he decides to look back up from his boots, he finds another look from her where he could nearly picture the gears turning in her head as she calculated the next words out of her mouth, satisfied that he was mollified into silence. 

“Everyone here knew what they were signing up for,” she says, leaning back on her good arm, chin up, proud, angry like him. Wonders how they move back and forth from one end to the next so easily together. Wonders what she thinks could possibly make him abandon this anger, guilt, shame at his position. Lily sighs, talks to him like she isn’t his subordinate and he isn’t anyone special. “Do you want to know  _ why  _ I put up with guarding the unguardable? Why I watch you play politics for hours on end with men and women I can’t stand? Why I trudge about the entire country so you can attend to every farmer’s pest problem, or why I stand by and watch you charm a chimera instead of killing it?”

James stands very still. He doesn’t want to give her his honest answer, which is that none of this is worth it, not for her, not if it means she’ll die for a future she’ll never see. That’s what happens to foot soldiers in a war. They become playthings for the powerful. He’s seen it with the Eaters, he’s seen it with the Mages. 

He wishes the Mages never involved anyone beyond their Nine. What a cowardly thing for them to have done. 

He opens his mouth. He’s going to tell her a lot of things, like how he’s a coward above all else and how he doesn’t want her to die. She doesn’t let him start, since she wasn’t finished. Lily Evans leans forward, lets her auburn hair cascade round her neck. She never tied her shirt again, still more exposed than ever, still like that because of him and nothing could change that. 

“The Mages from Ravenclaw are too concerned for the purity of arcane knowledge than the availability of its study. The Hufflepuff Mages care too much about the wrong minute details of this war, and the Slytherin Mages never wanted arcane knowledge out the hands of the few in the first place. And as for McGonagall,” Lily sighs, runs her hand through her hair, scowls, “I love McGonagall. She was my favorite professor at the Academy. But I’m afraid she’s been in the system too long and finds the theater of bureaucracy necessary.”

He just grimaces. He’d say the same of her if pressed. The Mage of Many Forms never took the form of someone who was fine with acting now and thinking later, never took the form of someone who would tell Dumbledore he’s full of it, even when he is.

Lily keeps going, her voice still low.

“I enlisted in the 78th when they broke my wand. I learned to fight because I hate Eaters and what they do to the natural world. But I took your insignia— not the phoenix, not the tabby— because you help farmers make sure their families and villages have healthy crop for the season. I follow  _ you _ because you refused to kill a lost chimera who was afraid, not dangerous. Even more importantly I follow you because she  _ was  _ dangerous and by all rights you should be dead right now, but you aren’t.” The look she gives him now is different than the way anyone has looked at him before. At least it’s different than any look he’s noticed before, but that doesn’t mean much, because some days he suspects he never noticed anything before he noticed her. Lily’s looking at him in a way he refuses to believe, like he’s not just someone to die for; he’s someone to live for, too.

“You’re the only Mage I trust in this godforsaken realm, Potter. Even after the Crouch business, even after today. I want to see more of the world we grew up in, not this dried, barren land devoid of magic.” Her voice takes on a softer quality than what it had been when she criticized his actions but the others’ characters. It does that thing to him like before, comforts him, makes him believe what she says is true. “I think you’re the only Mage on the Council who sees that vision, too.”

James just… nods. He has to stand up, turn away from her. Can’t look at her any longer when she’s looking at him like that, like she means what she’s saying, like he’s something important to her. The longing in her voice, dreaming and grieving for time past, seeps through his skin like a poison, tugging at his heart like death. 

He’d give it all to her if he could. Win the war, give her magic back, rebuild the world the Mages broke in order to save it. He’d do it single handedly if he knew how, and he thinks he might just try to anyway, if only so that she knew he would

And that’s wrong. The world is more than just Lily Evans, baker’s daughter, former student, current foot soldier. Former friend, former  _ something  _ to him. He knows that. He remembers her, remembers them, and they were  _ something.  _ But that was then, and this is now. They were kids and now they aren’t. She wasn’t his then, isn’t his now, never will be his, because she isn’t something to be had or possessed, not by him, but not by her current lover, either.

“We’ll get that world back,” is what he says. Promises. He can still do that for her, even if she isn’t his, because he wants to. Because the world is complicated and so is she, but she’s good, and good deserves good. That’s what he believes, at least. He still can’t face her, though. He makes the promise to the bottles near his boots in the baskets Peter reorganized earlier. “It’s still out there.”

“I know,” she whispers, something that’s carried through the air. “I can feel it. I can see it.”

She was always a talent at the divining arts. Scrying, too. Once, he remembers, she’d helped them—

“Blech,” he hears Lily spit. James turns around, startled, and sees his teacup in her hand, sees her face in a grimace, poking her tongue out her mouth. She’d drank his tea. Improper, insolent. He loves it. “You could have told me it was cold.”

And they're back at it again. “Serves you right, taking what isn’t yours.”

“I thought you brought it for me! After I nearly  _ died _ for you—”

“Yes, but all the same, there are things called manners, Evans—”

“—nearly gave my life in the service of such a Great Mage, and you can’t give me something so simple as something to drink?”

“You deserve better than that waste of leaves,” James rolls his eyes, exasperated, entertained, thrilled, enthralled by her. Dangerous, bad, will have to be dealt with in the morning. “Here,” he says, stalking back towards her, maneuvering his offering from his belt. He holds the wineskin out to her, an olive branch of some sorts, an offering of some sorts. “Take it. You’re off duty, anyway. Good wine, from Badger’s Den in Hufflepuff. Have you been to their orchards? I daresay even Godric’s Men would find reason to imbibe.”

Lily’s face is golden when she takes the leather wineskin from him, eyes sparkling with excitement. “I was mostly kidding, you know.”

“But I’m not. I did, in fact, bring that for you, which you would have found out if you had an ounce of patience in you.”

“Oh, yes. I’m very sorry. Who has been giving you tutoring in virtues? I must get their name, since you’re so patient and level-headed, not at all prone to stubbornness or—“

“Alright, alright!” James laughs, genuinely, boldly, good, holding up his hands in defeat. “Point taken, Evans.”

She smiles back at him, cradling her new gift in her one good arm. He has to leave now or else he thinks he might do something stupid, like stay. He’ll do something stupid like think there’s something there in her for him. He’ll do something stupid like hope or dream that they could be anything more than a scandal. 

He moves to leave, backing out slowly. “Recover, won’t you? I truly think Moody will by my next assassin if you have to be retired.”

“Well, alright,” she agrees, smiling fondly at him. “Even though I desperately want to see what you could unleash on each other, Last of His Line.”

He laughs again, easy. “I  _ don’t. _ It’ll be embarrassing, really, how easily Moody would best me.”

He’s nearly out, nearly to safety, when the next oddity happens. In great coincidence, the tent flap whips wildly back at him as he moves to grab for it, the candles protected in lamps all flicker sporadically at once, going brighter than before and then returning to their dim flicker. 

James holds his hand over the tent flap, squinting. Turns back to Lily. “Huh. Did you see that?” 

Lily, who is sitting very straight up, blinks at him curiously. 

“Sorry, did I see what?”

“The lamps,” James says, more to himself than to her. There is something familiar in the air that he can’t name, something he remembers but doesn’t. “Did you see them flicker? All of them?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Lily crinkles her brows at him. “You know how drafty these tents get.” Before he can respond, suddenly she’s standing, walking towards him, good arm outreached, spare linen shirt billowing behind her, floating.

“You nearly forgot,” she explains herself, holding up his abandoned tea in her hands, smiling sweetly. Innocently. 

“Oh, right, thank you,” James extends his hand out to take the cup from her. Fingers brush. He tries not to think about it. ”Good night, Evans.”

“Night, sir.”

***

It takes him until well after he’s left her, til well after he’d sat down again at his desk, changed into his night things, brought his cup to his reading corner to finish the dregs, and tucked himself beneath his blankets to realize it, in one of those eyes-fly-open, heart-stops-beating sorts of moments. Sit-up-in-bed-and-panic sort of moment. He reaches for his teacup, empty now. Stares down at it (he isn’t wearing his glasses, so it’s blurred to shit, but he’s still staring at it, alright). 

His tea was hot when he left her. His horrible, you-deserve-it tea was at perfect temperature and never cooled again, even when he’d bathed, when he snuck out the back of his tent for a walk in the stars, snuck back in, took another bath, to clear his head, cleanse his mind. His tea was hot, enjoyable, drinkable until its last from the moment he took it from her hands. 

Undeniably, arcanely so. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> author’s note edited 9.27.20:  
> im having a hard time feeling excited about this story which i WAS really excited to do and world build in the most original way i had attempted to do so far, and I have a lot of things I’d like to say to an author but most of all to i just wanna support the people most harmed by her and NOT contribute to that pain and I’m still seeing how i can do that and whether or not writing with her characters causes harm. 
> 
> love one another and donate to gendered intelligence and mutual aid.


	6. Past and Present

He’d spent most of the night awake, pacing, after that. Forget the war. That was easy to figure out, puzzle through, map next steps and develop rituals for. This thought, this impossible probability of several dimensions, is far more of a dangerous thing to his health and safety, to  _ her  _ health and safety, than the threat of Voldemort and his Eaters devouring magic from the earth and air around them.

The only thing is that if she— Now, if she  _ had  _ been the one to— if she was the one who warmed his tea, made that change, altered the state of things, gifted him with something good, then that would mean that she could perform, well... Which isn’t  _ possible,  _ since the only ones who could manipulate the world without wands destroyed the world they sought to control, and so little about her screams  _ destruction.  _

So maybe it was him. Maybe he’d warmed his tea, forgot about it in thinking of her, absentminded like his father used to be when he was preoccupied. How many potions did he watch his father boil over when his mother was away, when she was home, even? Isn’t that more likely than the alternative, that Lily Evans, baker’s daughter, former friend, current foot soldier, is an Eater? Lily Evans?  _ Lily?  _

He doesn’t know Sirius. He doesn’t know Lily. But he trusts them both, which is the weirdest part of it all. Trusts Sirius a great deal more, though, and that’s why he’s been waiting all day for the guard to rotate, waiting all day to finally get some questions to the answers he’s had for weeks now, since before Crouch did whatever he did.  _ Why  _ he needs a full regiment while he’s got his wand and years of advanced training and wards and portals and spell scrolls remains beyond him. Why anyone should have to wear his insignia— lion, for his mother. Stars, for his brother. Flower, for his… nothing— is beyond him. After Crouch, he’d begged his sect of the council to allow him to travel solo, then begged again in last night’s incident report to the Grand Mage. He’d give up his guard, go back to empty halls and empty beds at the Hollows, if no one else got hurt for him. But Dumbledore insists, and McGonagall insists, so. He still has a guard. 

Anyway, James is sitting by a tree at the edge of the clearing and Sirius Black whips off his helmet, his hair falling back to frame his face like it hadn’t been encapsulated all day, like he’d just styled it, effortless. Prick. He’s got a scowl on his face and it still looks good.

“Longbottom’s a giant prat,” Sirius grumbles, sitting down next to James, leaning his head against the same tree James’ head is resting on. “Don’t know  _ who _ he thinks he is these days, raving madder than Moody. Fucking bonkers.”

James shrugs. “Moody thinks there’s something big coming, but he always thinks that. Maybe Frank agrees.”

“Maybe Frank is pissed at  _ you,”  _ Sirius says pointedly, glancing at James from the side of his eye. “You know. Nearly getting yourself killed on his watch.”

“I didn’t,” James sighs, ignoring the nagging sense of guilt pulling down at his stomach. “Wasn’t even a poison knife.”

“No, but Evans still had to take it, didn’t she?”

There’s an edge to Sirius’ voice that James deserves, and an edge he can’t own up to, not yet, so he just shrugs, avoids it (shameful, cowardly), and asks, “How hard will it be for me to convince you to skive off to the woods for a ride?”

“Depends,” Sirius replies evenly, the edge softer but still sharp. “Got anymore of that wine you gave Evans last night?”

James rolls his eyes. Wants to forget about anger, just for a moment. “My best mate. Using me.”

Sirius holds out his hand. James hands over the wineskin strapped to his back that he  _ did  _ pack for the two of them. He’s going to need more hide at this rate. Sirius grins, successful. 

“See? Was that so hard?”

“You say that, but you have no idea what I had to do for a barrel of that stuff.”

“Oh, no,” Sirius says with obvious sarcasm. “Don’t tell me. Schmooze up with Sprout at a formal dinner for longer than you’d have liked? Steal it out of a burning building? Seduce the winemaker’s daughter and run out the house robeless?”

“Very funny,” James grunts (Moody would be proud), standing like Sirius, walking over to where he’d tethered two horses to a water trough. One of Sirius’ guesses is right and he won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing which one.

“Come on,” Sirius prods gently, grabbing one of the reigns from James’ hand. Can tell something’s up. “Let’s ride. You’ll feel better.”

He and Sirius ride until James feels they no longer have to, until they’re far away enough from camp to feel safe from good ears, until he’s far away enough from the scene of his crime (her crime?) to feel able to talk about it. This stretch of Gryffindor mores is one of his favorite parts of his summer travels; hills turn into mountains as easily as they turn to valleys, a constant reminder about how it is nature’s nature to change. Humbles him. Reminds him of the ways he’s changed and stayed the same, reminds him of his hypocrisy, expecting the others to never change, to always be who he remembered. 

They dismount at the top of a ravine, serine patches of sunlight filtering through the trees creating a backdrop of calm normalcy for it all.

Sirius settles himself down on a smooth rock before beginning the intricate process of unbuckling his armor, settling piece by piece aside in order, as he asks, “Now, what’s eating your hat? Aside from almost killing Evans, that is.”

“That  _ is _ on my mind,” James grits out, knowing an apology is owed to Sirius as well, not ready to make that particular leg of this trek quite yet. “But there’s something else. It’s not, um, that big of a deal, but it  _ is  _ confusing, and I don’t want to sound like I’m blowing anything out of the water by asking, feel a bit silly and everything—”

“James. Spit it out.”

“It’s just I noticed something funny last night is all,” James runs his hand through his hair, stands across from Sirius, free hand on hip. “After I talked to Evans.”

“Oh?” 

“I’d brought my tea with me,” James explains, eyes darting to Sirius’ before going back to taking in the scenic ravine, avoiding him. Tries not to feel like a ponce for getting caught up in  _ tea  _ for Godric’s sake. “And it was cold, right? I mean, I’d made it right before, well, you know, when I went out to see what the hubbub with the cleric was—”

“Right before you walked right into a death trap?”

“Again, it wasn’t even a poisoned knife, please stop giving Godric’s Men more credit than due for total lack of sophistication or ingenuity—”

“Right, apologies,” Sirius rolls his eyes. “This is right before you ignored orders and made Evans take a not-poisoned-so- _ obviously _ -not-lethal-and-totally-fine knife for you—”

“Which I am sorry for! And which I apologized for! Which leads me to my  _ point,  _ which is that I’d made tea for myself and then it grew cold while I had to have it out with Moody and then had to write up a report to Dumbledore then another to McGonagall, and then I helped the kitchens with dinner while waiting to talk to Evans—”

“I’m no Mage, but I  _ do  _ remember learning about how hot things turn cold,” Sirius says with a bit of a wry smile, still not taking him seriously. “In fact, in my everyday life without magic, I find the process of cooling to be just  _ spectacularly _ interesting—“

“Sirius. I’m trying to say that I went in to the med tent with cold tea that I’d over-seeped and drank out of masochism because Dad hated when I wasted anything at all, and then I left with fantastic, perfectly brewed, perfectly delectable tea after Evans handed my cup back to me.”

Now Sirius seems very interested in finishing removing his armor. When it was clear James wasn’t finished, when he started pacing again, Sirius finally prompts, “And?”

“ _And_ I don’t think it was me who charmed it hot. _” And_ the part he’d been most reluctant to give words to. That’s something he knows as a Mage, as a wizard, as a human. The spoken word is power. “You don’t think it’s possible… you don’t think it’s possible that Evans still has her wand, do you?”

Sirius doesn’t answer him immediately. He’d been stalling this entire conversation and continues to do so, taking his time unbuckling the metal around his calf before setting it down slowly. 

“Now,” he looks up at James with a blank expression. “What makes you ask such a stupid question?”

“It’s not stupid,” James crosses his arms, feeling a bit stupid. “I don’t have another explanation. I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.”

“Evans doesn’t have her wand,” Sirius says very seriously, looking James in the eye. “I know that because I saw them break it myself, just after they broke mine. I watched her wand go up in flames on that pyre the same day I watched mine. It isn’t something you’re likely to forget in a lifetime.”

He’s just in his soft leather under armor now, takes a swig from the wine satchel thrown on the ground before them, holds it out James, takes it back. Not really looking at him.

“It was a horrible day. You should have seen it.”

“Tell me about it, then,” James asks quietly, joining Sirius where he sits. He almost regrets what he’d said the moment the words left his mouth, the moment Sirius looks up at him with a dark expression, but he doesn’t. This is a piece of history, ten years ago, that he wasn’t privy to. This is when their stories split, their histories solidified, their futures diverged. This is the point in which the world changed.

“You want to know what it was like that day?” Sirius asks, almost glaring at James. That’s fine. Angry Sirius is a Sirius he knows, one he remembers, one he understands. It’s fine. “Alright, Mage. Imagine this scene. We’re at dinner after exams because of those stupid qualifiers we had to take in fifth year, remember? But they’re done. We finished. Life is good. We’ve got the whole summer ahead of us to fuck around on the school grounds, Remus is in good health for once, Peter passed beyond all odds and to this day I don’t know how he managed it. You’ve fucked it up with Evans because you’re a prat and Snape’s a horrifying little menace and it doesn’t fucking matter because we’ve got the summer to patch things up, even if she did say she’d rather date a kraken than go out with you. It doesn’t matter because we’ve got time, you know?”

Sirius scoffs. Spits on the ground. Looks disgusted. “What idiocracy. What goddamn foolishness that was to think, just because we’re at dinner and we’re young and things are good. Because that’s when Dumbledore bursts through the door.”

None of what Sirius recounts is new. He remembers those days of youth, he remembers feeling like nothing can go wrong. He remembers this day too well, has replayed the events in his mind too many times. He knows what’s coming next. 

“Dumbledore comes through and fucking— I mean, he just  _ grabs _ you. There’s no fanfare, there’s no lies or condolences or even a ‘Hello, students, no need to be concerned.’ He strides in there and takes your elbow and turns on his foot and then you’re  _ gone.” _

_ Gone  _ isn’t really true. James didn’t leave the Academy. He’d stayed, confined to the north tower. Gone describes what happened to the rest of the students. He’d stayed. The Mages moved into the Academy, trained him individually, trained him alone. But this is Sirius’ story, not his.

“One minute I’m sitting across from my best friend and the next I’m not. One minute the world makes sense and the next it doesn’t, because I have to hear from McGonagall, standing at the front of the great hall, that the Mage of Many Words had been assassinated. It took me a moment to realize who she was talking about. I’d never called her that, not even in those early days and especially not in those later days. No.  _ I _ called her ‘mother.’”

Sirius speaks now to the trees, eyes straight forward, seeing visions of the past that James can’t see. Sirius takes another pull from the flask before he speaks again. His voice sounds thicker. James has never known him to cry. 

“That’s when the Order moves in. McGonagall is nearly in tears herself but she isn’t stopping anything from happening. She says the Mages have decided that the Eaters have grown too strong, making a direct move on one of the Nine. The Mages have decided that  _ for our safety  _ and for the  _ safety of the world, _ we have to turn in our wands. She says that the Eaters have grown too powerful and that to preserve the world of magic we have to leave it in the hands of the Mages, not allow a single wand to fall into the wrong hands.” He scoffs again. Closes his eyes, head tilted up to the skies. 

“That’s what I hate about politicians. She’s only saying we have to hand over our wands. What she doesn’t say is the full truth that every single one of us understood regardless— that we can’t do anything without those wands. We’d been raised for years to see our wands as a part of ourselves, to see ourselves as conduits for magic and the arcane, trained to know that we’re nothing without our instruments… she wasn’t ordering us to give up our wands. She was ordering us to give up magic, like it’s something that could just be abandoned, forgotten, divested.

“First years were crying, the seventh years were stupid enough to pick fights they could never win, and then Evans is sitting next to me when she hadn’t been before. She was still pissed at us from levitating Snape that day and pissed at Snape for whatever he said to her afterwards, but she’s holding my hand when the Order of the Phoenix member comes up to our table. Peter’s crying. Remus is shaking. Evans is holding my hand.” His voice moves from pained to disgusted. There isn’t shame in his voice, just anger. Bitterness. “We all give up our wands without a word, without a fight. That was the end of magic.”

Sirius doesn’t say anything for a long time after that. James doesn’t either. He’s not sure what he could say about events that happened a decade ago, events that he has nothing to do with except for the fact that they gave him more power than he ever dreamed of. It was one thing to be born to a Mage; another to be only one of Nine left in the realm legally allowed to do magic. Sirius seems equally lost in thought, staring ahead, pulling blades of grass up by the fistful. 

“I’m sorry,” he turns his head to look at James for the first time in a while, haunted eyes meeting haunted eyes. “I know you lost your mother that day. Got orphaned that day. But we lost a lot, too. Including you.”

“I lost you, too,” James says back, voice coming out in nothing more than a whisper. He thinks he would trade all the magic in the world for a chance to have never lost sight of his friends. He doesn’t know which of them ended up worse. “I lost more than my mother. I lost you. I lost everyone.”

“But not  _ magic,”  _ Sirius emphasizes, not unkindly, but forcefully. “I get it. I know you. I know this isn’t what you wanted. But you got to keep magic, mate. You weren’t forced to cut off a limb of yourself and told it was an act of patriotism. You have no idea what it’s like to miss magic, the maddening  _ longing _ that comes from it. I swear, some days I feel my bones  _ itch  _ for want of it, like it’s still in there, waiting…” He shakes his head again. James watches him flex his hand, fingers stretched (his left, his wand arm, he remembers) and make a fist, involuntary. But then he’s quiet again, lost in time and memory again.

James prods him out of it, almost with regret, but not quite. What a rare time of solitude and information for him, of company and memory. “You still fight for the Mages, though,” James says with curiosity, looking at him evenly, trying to figure this out. It’s a rare opportunity to hear about the war from someone other than Dumbledore or Moody or the rest of the council. “You volunteered. You learned how to fight without a wand for the Mages.” 

“I don’t fight for the Mages,” Sirius scoffs, looking at James with the first sign of disdain this whole time for the mere suggestion. “I never have and never will. I’m just here to see how many Eaters I can take down before they take me. I  _ hate  _ them. Bleeding cowards fighting behind masks, not a care in the world for what they need to destroy in order to spread their ethos.” Sirius doesn’t have to add anything else. He doesn’t have to talk about his parents and their early support of Voldemort. He doesn’t have to bring up Regulus. They both remember. “I fight for the realm because  _ someone  _ has to and I don’t trust anyone else to do the right thing.” The next look Sirius gives James is blazing, but he can’t tell what fuels the fire, since Sirius goes from one tindering explanation to another. “I fight because you’re my brother, James. I took your insignia the moment I could because I trust you. You aren’t some archwizard isolated from the world and you’re a shit politician. Even you could never be that self-inflated. You’re my brother. I don’t know who else can help us out of this war.”

James feels his heart swell in pride, guilt, shame, embarrassment, surprise. He’d thank Sirius, but his throat is almost too thick to talk. And besides, Sirius isn’t finished. The next words out of his mouth are blazing hot again, a searing indictment against James. Unexpected and all the more heard for it. 

“So don’t ask stupid questions like whether or not Lily Evans has her wand when you know that’s impossible,” Sirius dismisses scathingly, standing up, striding away, turning back to James, hands on his hips. “Don’t go around accusing her of treason because you’re confused about your bleeding fucking tea, James. That’s dangerous and you should know better. You have more influence than you’ve ever wanted to admit and it’s going to get her killed if you go around with accusations like this. Bad enough she took that madman for you, but for you to repay that act of sacrifice with this codswallop.”

“I’m not accusing her of—“

“You are,” Sirius bites out, crossing his arms. “Weren’t you listening to a word of what I just said? If the Council got a single whiff of your suspicion, Lily would be Vanished before you could blink. _You_ are not concerned for such trivialities, not when it comes to _her,_ but the Council _is._ Don’t you remember that idiot Shunpike who bragged about how he knew how to bring back magic without wands? Who could have guessed then that he _could_ have known something, but we all laughed when he first said so. Then he was gone from the Knight Bus the next _day._ No amount of protestation from you could protect her from an accusation of practicing magic.”

“I understand,” James says, looking up at Sirius. Sirius would have made a much better Mage than him, he thinks, with his fine features and finer speech. Sirius grew up around province governors and wealth and hated every minute of it, mostly because one look at him even today is enough to know who he was, who he is. Orion’s boy who never went back home. James’ boyish looks and unruly hair could never compete with Sirius’ sophistication. Makes him remember where he is, who he’s talking to, and why. 

“I understand,” James repeats again, firmly, when Sirius looks back down at him with a glare. “You’ll never hear me mention it again. I must have forgotten I’d reheated my tea. I was… distracted, I guess.” He pauses. Swallows his pride along with his old hopes and dreams. 

“She’s lucky to have you.”

“Yeah,” Sirius says, narrowing his eyes a little. “We’ve been through a lot together.”

“Certainly,” James says, stuttering and staggering a little bit now, his stomach back to feeling like a pit, feels almost worse than accusing her of treason, “It’s no wonder you ended up together.”

“Fucking  _ shit,” _ Sirius swears, looking back up to the skies, pinching the bridge of his nose now. “I should have known this is why you were being such an ass.”

“It was a compliment—!”

“Can’t  _ believe  _ I didn’t think of this earlier, should have realized the fucking moment we got assigned—“

“Look, I’m sorry, alright? Honest. I didn’t realize until last night that—“

“I’m not sleeping with Evans,” Sirius interrupts him, and for the first time in a long while, he doesn’t look angry at James. He’s laughing. “Helga bleeding Hufflepuff. Can you imagine?”

Sirius chuckles for a bit more, wipes a tear from his eye, mutters more about the absurdity of the thought. 

“But you’re— I mean, at night—“

“What, wandering? Exploring? Like what  _ we  _ did back in school, you absolute jealous hypocrite?”

James, still feeling a bit shameful, a bit greedy, more than a bit relieved, crosses his arms petulantly. “It’s a reasonable thought! You two are so close, and last night—“

“Founders above, I have to get you out of that Council,” Sirius shakes his head again, still chuckling, sits back down in the grass again. “You really haven’t talked to a real person or had a real relationship with one in years, have you?”

James grumbles another grumbled answer that would have made Moody proud. Sirius takes a little pity on him, speaks with a little less mockery and a lot more patience. 

“Lily’s saved my life on more than one occasion. I figure I’ve done the same for her. She’s stitched me up and I’ve stitched her up on more than one occasion. Just because  _ some  _ people can’t see a bit of Lily without losing it doesn’t mean we all can’t.”

James ignores the jab in Sirius’ comment; figures he might just deserve it. Hopeful, now, and unashamedly so, he looks up at his friend. “So Lily isn’t seeing anyone, then?”

“No, prat,” Sirius says, taking the wineskin back from James. “Where do you think we’d have the time? Or the freedom? We don’t stick around one place for long.”

James doesn’t answer, just nods contentedly. He has to sort of dip his head so Sirius can’t see his slow, unfurling smile, beaming. Old hopes and dreams given new life. He suspects Sirius knows just the same and, perhaps for self-preservation, refuses to engage any further. Sirius stands, scanning the horizon. 

“Now. I think we aren’t far from where Peter said there was a hidden valley.”

“There is!” James says excitedly, scouring the horizon for familiar landmarks. He’d always had a knack for maps and for drawing. In another life he could have been a cartographer or an artist or architect. Anything other than Mage. In another life his just “husband” or just “father.” That would be nice. “Just past there, I think.”

“The kind with a lake at the bottom?” Sirius’ eyes are bright, like James remembers. A scheme afoot. 

“Absolutely.”

“First one off the cliff wins?”

“Wins what?”

“Not sure yet. Maybe just the loser has to stay Mage.”

“That’s not fair,” James starts, but Sirius is already running for the hills, his laughter trailing behind him in the wind. James has to take a moment to rip his maroon robes off his body, carefully remove and hide his wooden medallion from his neck under his robes, before he can dash after Sirius, also laughing, also free, for just this moment.

Sirius wins with his head start, but not by much. At least the summer treks keep him in shape, like maybe one day when he isn’t a Mage he can get back into sports like when he was young. And maybe his losing is for the best, since he really doesn’t know how Sirius would be as a Mage despite his regal looks and voice. By the time they trek back up the cliff side, dried by the setting sun and the gentle wind at their backs, James feels as if some weight has been lifted from his shoulders, absolved and assuaged from at least some of the guilt tugging at his conscience. 

Back at their horses, back with his robes on, back to going back to who they are now instead of who they were, Sirius grabs James by the shoulder. 

“Now,  _ don’t  _ start asking me if Evans fancies you. We aren’t fifteen anymore. If you want to know, ask her yourself,” Sirius says, holding the reigns to his horse. “But before you do that, let me remind you. You’re a Mage. You’re on the council. You have power none of us can imagine when you’ve got your wand. Evans is on your advanced guard and you’ve already suspected her of wrongdoing just because you can’t sort out what’s what for yourself. If you’re even thinking of telling her how you feel, then you tell  _ me _ what exactly you think is going to go right, when so much can go wrong— can you honestly say that whatever you think  _ might _ happen between the two of you will be worth the cost?”

And James, well. James doesn’t give Sirius an answer. He doesn’t have one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> genuinely appreciate each one of you, especially for the comments on the last chapter. that's really all i can say and that i hope this story does good (not well. good!). 
> 
> i was too distracted last chapter to say the best aesthetic moment and in this one its actually the thought of a pyre of wands. dont know why. there's about two more chapters to this part of the saga. should be done soon! 
> 
> here's a link to a trans/gnc organization helping with housing in the american south. they recently reached their seed funding goal but additional help would go to a good cause: https://houseoftulip.org/


	7. Home, Home Again

So maybe James doesn’t have an answer for Sirius. And maybe Sirius knows that. And maybe Sirius is right to be concerned, all in all, but that fact can’t stop James from being annoyed at the situation, imagining himself the most inconvenienced by his circumstances before catching himself in that falsehood. He’d rather be a merchant than Mage, foot soldier than occasional political pawn, but he isn’t the one most impacted by all this, not by a long shot. 

James has questions that have multiple answers. James has questions that Lily can answer as well as questions Sirius can, Dumbledore and McGonagall and Eaters and Voldemort can answer. He has questions he would do a lot to ask his father. He has less he can answer for himself, the most worrying part of it all. 

By a stroke of good or bad fortune, James Potter finds himself in the company of Lily Evans at previously unprecedented amounts of time as the Hollows draw ever nearer, now a few days away instead of few weeks away, instead of a few months, away. The Hollows. Home, a hollowed out home that used to be full of sounds from his father’s alchemy lab, his mother’s laughter with diplomats and the other of the Nine, Sirius’ footsteps running next to him, in sync, good, familiar. 

Its proper title is Godric’s Hollow, named for its proximity to Gryffindor’s own grave. No one calls it that anymore. Not in ten years. Just the Hollows. 

The Hollows, where the 78th’s contract ends, as Moody reminded him this morning. Now James has two warnings in his head, a loop of Sirius warning him against brash action and his sixteen year old self yelling that time lost cannot be found again. 

Frank and Alice are way ahead, scouting for any danger, while Moody flanks the rear with Dearborn and McKinnon. James, riding rear as well, is pulled out of his thoughts by his newfound companion, whose constant company is a mystery to him. She should be angry, she should never want to speak to him again after he hurt her like that, and yet it’s Lily Evans who seeks him out, finds his eye on the ride, moves her steed closer to his.

Time lost cannot be found again. He ignores Sirius. Will pay for that later. 

“I heard the Hollows’ wards are made of gold,” she says casually, arm no longer wrapped to her body but still benched until Remus’ clearance. He wishes she would have patched her leather armor, ripped where the knife went through, but that tear joins the rest of the scuffs on her suit. She’s looking at him with an expression so even he can’t tell if she’s kidding or if she’s curious. Then her eyebrow quips up. “Why is that? Common chalk not good enough for you?”

“Oh, har, har,” James rolls his eyes, entirely captivated. “Did Sirius tell you that?”

“Maybe.”

“Prat. If I tell you the truth— which is that my great-great-great-grandmother installed those wards and their being gold was still fashionable three millennia ago— will that make me seem better or worse to you?”

She pretends to deliberate her answer. He can tell she isn’t really doing any thinking, because she hums too casually, too playfully, at him. “Hm. Worse. Definitely worse.”

“That’s unfortunate. That must mean you don’t wish to see me reactivate the wards when we arrive.”

_ That  _ piques her interest. She always liked ritual casting, even though Evans  _ tries _ to seem bored when she asks, “I suppose you’d be using a standard shield charm cast directly into the symbols.”

“You underestimate me. Of course I’m using a Fidelius.”

She can’t pretend to  _ not  _ be impressed when she looks back over at him. “Blood magic?”

He holds up his hand, his right one, shows her his palm where a scar runs down the middle, healed over and healed over and healed over. 

“Play your cards right, Evans, and you might see the other reason why my great-great-great-grandmother decided on a permanent gold fixture. The effect is quite dramatic.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she says, and the smirk on her face feels like a smile when he takes her all in, still riding in sync, still moving in sync. In fact, they stay like that, quiet and in sync and together, for the next few hours that pass by in comfortable silence only occasionally interrupted by his pointing out landmarks, by quick reports from the scouts. 

When Sirius rides up, sitting on his fine black horse in his full plate armor, he doesn’t linger once he’d given report of the route diversion due to an overly flowing stream. Sirius just nods, turns his horse around, heads back to Alice at an impressive clip. 

“Sirius is upset,” Evans remarks casually, freely, like it doesn’t matter all that much, like she observed a landmark to  _ him  _ this time. But her eyes linger where he disappeared to. There’s a crease in her brow. It matters a lot. 

“I suspect he’s upset at me,” James says offhandedly, trying to not let it bother him, but it does bother him very much. He doesn’t want to have to pick. He wants his loyalties and loves in the same place, because to him, they’ve always been synonymous. 

“Unfortunately I think it’s me,” Lily corrects, slight grimace tugging at her lips. Ahead of them, encircled by members of the guard, ride Remus and Peter on their covered cart, the caravan’s only one. Peter waves jovially at James and Lily. Remus waves too, but more reserved. Looks concerned, he head swiveling from Evans to where Sirius rode off to. 

James turns his attention back to Evans, asking in genuine surprise, “ _ You _ ?”

“Afraid so.”

“Never.”

“We have a disagreement on how to go about things is all,” she shrugs, still at riding with him, still being honest with him.

“That’s unusual.”

“I know.” She pauses. He doesn’t expect her to elaborate, but she does, her face scrunched up in a way he can only describe as, well, cute. “Thinks I’m being reckless.”

“Sirius is concerned _you’re_ being reckless? Godric, Evans, now I’m concerned. For you and for him.”

She just shrugs. There’s a slight smile on her lips that’s paired well with the way her eyebrow quips up, pairs well with the way her gaze brushes over him and distracts him from paying attention where his horse is going for a moment. She does that easily— no, he gets distracted easily. He’ll claim ownership of his own weakness for her, can’t think that this is something she does on purpose. 

“Is this about your shoulder?” He looks at her hands holding the reins of her horse, looking for weakness in their grip, trying to not get distracted by the thought that she might be looking at him, like, really looking at him. “Shouldn’t you be riding with Remus and Peter?” 

“Ugh, not you  _ too,”  _ Evans sighs petulantly, rolling her eyes. Glad she isn’t in her helmet even though he misses her in full armor, just so he could see that eye roll. “I’m  _ fine.  _ The wound is  _ fine.  _ Stop the caravan and I’ll prove it just so everyone can stop asking about it.”

“Oh?” This time it’s his eyebrow quipped up. “How do you supposed to do that?”

“Easily. Best you in an arm wrestling competition, win in a joust, throw my lance farther than you could, or Godric willing I get my bloody sword back and knock you to the ground with it before you could ever raise your shield.”

What James  _ doesn’t  _ do is dwell on her request for a moment longer, too familiar with what would happen to him if his mind imagined out the exact scenarios she’s talking about, challenging himself to look very much straight forward when he tells her, “Tempting those may be, I’m afraid Remus already warned me you’d try to get back on duty ahead of schedule by any means possible. I am immune to your subterfuge, picking on my vulnerabilities like that. You know I miss a good competition.”

“I know,” Lily sighs, soft this time, no longer smirking like she was when he finally thinks he can handle turning back to her. “Well. I suppose it’s for the best, then,” she sighs again, this time less soft and more dramatic, this time with a gleam in her eye that isn’t soft either but bright. “It wouldn’t have been much of a competition, anyway. Not when we both know I’d win.” 

Maybe she  _ would  _ win. Maybe he has grown soft since his sporting days and his wand is a light thing to carry, and he’s seen her muscles at work, hasn’t seen his own in quite some time. James just isn’t sure any chance to be bested by Lily Evans really means he’s lost anything. 

***

Much to James’ surprise, it’s Frank who delivers his deliverance. Well, it’s Frank or it’s the Eaters. He can’t tell who he wants to give more credit to. 

The long and short of it comes on their arrival to the Hollows at the end of those final riding days, at the end of those days spent in the company of fireside chats with Remus and Peter, of brief but fine conversations with Sirius, and of watching her, well, blossom again. 

It was only yesterday that he emerged from his solitary diplomat’s tent before sunrise, already ready for the last of his hours with the 78th as they finish this last day to the Hollows before sunset, this last day of their contract. A whole summer come and gone, him in one piece, not a single member of his regiment dead or disappeared. A success by any measure— so why did he feel so awful? 

He woke up before sunrise to get the most of the day and of his friends, the people who did the impossible and reminded him he’s more than robes and more than his title but just, well, some person with old hopes and dreams that still beat in his chest. Reminded him that in any other lifetime a man his age would be free in ways he isn’t, in ways none of them are. Reminded him that this war has to be ended so others can have the youths they had to sacrifice. 

Maybe he was already looking for her in those early hours. Maybe she was waiting for him in the same early hours. He has no idea. All he knows is he hears the sound of metal armor moving against itself, hears the sound of an old familiar rhythm of an old familiar drill run solo and he knows it’s her. How he knows, why he knows, doesn’t matter. He’s starting to recognize that the answers to those questions can be of no consequence, but surely watching her from where he does is of no consequence.

Her hair is back to its proper braid, practical and serious, whipping out from around her as she moves as if it is an additional fiery weapon at her disposal. Every successful strike of her sword, sharpened and polished meticulously over the last few weeks, is bold as the next as she hacks away at the wooden training dummy. Each smile she gives at the end of her set is sweet, bold, arrogant, pleased at her form. 

“Cleared, then?” James asks, announcing himself behind her, breaking her rhythm. He did used to enjoy throwing her off her game— it seemed to even their playing field, in his opinion. Evans turns then, dropping her form, her sword still in her hand like an extension of her arm. She wipes her shining brow with her free hand, joy evident across her features, her vibrant smile matching her vibrant eyes.

“Last night!” She nods breathlessly, smile growing even wider. “Remus made me promise to take it easy, though.”

“And running drills by yourself before sunrise is easy?”

“Yeah,” she nods again, enthusiastically and unabashedly. “I  _ slept  _ before I did them. He should be happy with that.”

James feels his lips turn up at her attitude, her unashamedly girlish excitement at being back on duty. He’d known hundreds of foot soldiers before and could count on one hand the amount who respected their craft as much as Lily Evans did. 

“I imagine Sirius is pleased you waited an appropriate amount of time to be reckless, then,” he says leaning against the same wooden dummy she’d been hitting away at gleefully only minutes ago, his arms crossed, his tone light and friendly. Her sword is still in her hand, her eyes still bright, her chest still moving steadily with her quickened breath, from exertion or exhilaration, he can’t tell. 

“Well, he better be,” she shrugs, still too casually to mean nothing. 

“Better be?” An old familiar eyebrow raises itself quite of its own accord. “You haven’t told him yet?”

“No,” Evans says, a form of displeasure crossing her features for the first time he’s noticed this morning, pulling her brow down. She shrugs again. “He went to bed before I could say so, so I was going to surprise him. See if it might remind him I know what I’m doing and all.” 

“Alright then,” James shrugs, trying to match the casual way she just did. He strides back past her, out of the training square in fewer steps than it took him to get there in the first place. A few yards out the gate, he turns around, looking at her with a cocksure expression that was in complete opposition to her own. 

He jerks his head over his shoulder, where he’d been headed. “Aren’t you coming?”

She tilts her head to the side. Sheathes her sword. “Where?”

“Nothing surprises Sirius like the morning,” he grins toothily at her, wonders if this sort of giddy giggling he wants to do inside is because of her or because he’s thinking of a prank for the first time in a long time. “Two birds and whatnot.” 

And then Lily is ahead of him, running surprisingly silent for someone clothed in metal, silent but for the excited laughter radiating out from her mouth. 

He couldn’t have asked for a sweeter homecoming gift than her health (or for a sweeter gift than Sirius’ undignified yelp of surprise when he woke up in the barracks to a sword at his neck. Though his hair  _ still  _ looked dignified despite that, the bastard. It’s infuriating). The other homecoming gift he received was not as sweet and definitely unasked for, unexpected, and deeply unsettling. 

The Hollows aren’t much, really, especially when compared to the other Mages’ strongholds. It looks different than it did when he was a kid, though. It used to be just a stone manor with additions in different colors and bricks, a hodgepodge place where generations of Potters incorporated their needs onto the bones of the the original cottage allegedly built by Gryffindor himself. Bedrooms, banquet halls, stables, treasure troves, and potion rooms alike create an elaborate maze inside, the perfect sort of exciting place for James to roam on his own and an even better place for two boys to sneak about in once Sirius moved in.

The hodgepodge manor of a cottage isn’t the first thing he notices when the Hollows come into sight at the top of its hill. He doesn’t even notice the brick walls and turrets surrounding the stronghold that got added after the Mage of Many Words was murdered in her own garden as she was cutting roses off the bush to use for decoration for when her sons came home to visit after their qualifiers finished, cutting lavender for her husband’s grave to help his peaceful rest. No. The first thing he notices, riding up with the rear with Mad-Eye catching up to him now, too, is the small crowd gathered in front the gate that Ogg or Rosmerta should have opened for the Longbottom’s upon their arrival. 

He and Moody pick up their pace at the same time, but James beats Moody up the hill (he  _ is  _ still competitive) and practically jumps off his horse before she can even slow down enough to push through the guard to the front, where his advanced guard is staring grimly down in the waters in the moat.

James looks down at the waters. Looks up at the wall. Waves at Ogg up there, waving down at him.

“Afternoon, Ogg!” He calls, his hand now shielding his eyes from the sun shining right above his groundskeeper, a rather inconvenient spot to converse, but, well, here they are. “New collection of yours?”

“Hardly,” Ogg spits, aiming at the writhing mass in the moat. “Dunno how it happened, sir. Wasn’t like this last night. Rosmerta noticed ‘em this morning.”

“Everyone alright, then? No trouble inside?”

“Aye, s’all fine here. You’ve got a mess on your hands, though. I’ve no idea how to clean ‘em out.” 

“Come now, Ogg,” James smiles. “Isn’t animal handling in your job description?”

“Hmph,” Ogg snorts, crossing his arms. “Yours, more like. I’ll eat my hat if those aren’t necrotic.”

It doesn’t take an arcanist’s education to know that something sinister is behind the hundreds and hundreds of snakes now swimming in his moat, which he knows used to be filled with nothing more harmful than slimy fish that freaked him out when they swam past. They move about the water like worms in mud, poking up and fighting each other above the surface before collapsing below the murky water just to rise back up again, a cycle. A message. 

“Keep your hat,” James calls, looking back up at Ogg. “Can’t tell what it would do to your stomach and all. We’ll be in once I get this sorted.”

Ogg nods and retreats back inside a turret. Down on the ground, James stands with his hands on his hips, turning to Frank and Alice with a bright smile. 

“Right. Welcome to the Hollows! We usually have fewer cursed snakes about.” 

Alice just shakes her head. Her usually cheery disposition is apparently in no mood for his joking. Behind her, Sirius and Remus are leaning as far over into the moat as can reasonably be considered safe and Frank and Moody are ordering McKinnon and Meadowes to take extra soldiers for a perimeter sweep. Evans’ eyes are fixed on the drawn up gate, where there is a sign hung up just above it like a banner with a singular arrow as its pin, artful and precise, while the giant message flows peacefully in the light evening breeze. He didn’t notice the banner at first, but she isn’t the only one staring at it now. Other soldiers also point up at it, alternating between interest in the moat and interest in the bridge. A wonderfully entertaining welcome gift for them all.

“Entertaining” is obviously a joke. McGonagall used to point that out to him, that he used humor to deflect from his fear. That’s what this is, actually. Because the banner does rattle him and he  _ hates  _ that it does. 

“I think they’ve gotten a little ahead of themselves here,” James says, stepping closer to Lily, his voice quiet. “What’s the expression about counting chickens?”

His heart is racing. Pounding. He can’t show it’s gotten to him, not in front of his guard, not in front of her. But it  _ has _ , and he knows it, because his hand unconsciously starts to toy with the wooden beads of the necklace round his neck, whose medallion still rests on his chest. It does get to him. Reading the pronouncement  _ Here lies the Last of His Line  _ in deep red ink  _ does  _ disturb him. The Hollows haven’t been threatened in the last decade. So far, he hadn’t been threatened in a way that actually upset him like this. 

Evans looks him in the eye only briefly before they dart back to the banner. He wishes they wouldn’t do that. Beside her, Alice shakes her head again.

“ _ Snakes _ . Your groundskeeper is a smart man, Mage. I imagine lowering the bridge will activate whatever horror they’re set to unleash on us. He was right to wait.”

“Ogg is a good man,” James agrees, drawing his eyes down from the banner and away from Lily as he pulls his wand out, “But I don’t want to give the Eaters too much credit. The snakes are harmless.”

Both Alice and Lily turn their heads to look at him with identical doubtful expressions. James shrugs. 

“The snakes aren’t necrotic. They’re harmless,” he repeats. “The message... Not so much.” Then, to prove his point, James scans his guard again, cups his hand to his mouth. “Oi! Sirius! Throw that rock in the water.”

Sirius, good friend or idiot, does so immediately, despite Remus’ objection and attempt to stop him. But nothing happens. The rock phases through, and James smiles in satisfaction. 

“An illusion,” he explains, turning back to Alice. “A good one, of course, but an illusion nonetheless. It’s running on a loop. Can’t you see the same green and silver snake bite the yellow snake in the same spot, over and over?” He points to their left. “Just there?”

“I’ll be damned,” Alice whistles quietly, breathing out the breath she’d been holding in this whole time. None of them wanted to fight snakes any more than they wanted to fight their masters.

Evans turns her attention away from the cursed arrow and banner, standing next to Alice, her eyes squinting in the spot he pointed out, no doubt frustrated she didn’t notice before he did.

“What’s the message, then?” 

She doesn’t have much more time to stare at the loop. James draws a rune in the air and sends it towards the drawbridge; in an instant, the illusion disappears. The snakes vanish.

The cursed arrow and its message on the bridge stay there, though, hanging like a flag against the wind. That one isn’t an illusion. That threat’s real. Whoever pinned the message to his door for the very day they were set to arrive is a real person. Something in his chest, in his stomach, sinks with dread.

“Sir?” Evans repeats, staring at him when he took too long to answer her, holding his wand out again to command the bridge to lower. It’s only her next to him; Alice is talking to Frank and Moody in hushed tones away from them. She’s looking at him expectantly. “The message?”

“Don’t tell me you can’t figure that one out, either, Evans.”

It comes out a little tougher than he’d intended it to, a little more accusatory than he’d intended it to. A defense mechanism, hiding his weakness, revealing what he should have kept hidden for his pride if it weren’t for the fact that he is, again, more shaken by this than he wants to admit. She notices his tone, makes hers match his, expression a bit cold. Or maybe it isn’t cold, it’s just professional. Detached. Analytical. The things that made her a good student and make her a good soldier.

“The message is that what we’re doing is pointless,” she says, standing tall, her chin held up in pride despite who she’s talking to and what she’s saying about him, about the war. “That we are up against snakes who can shed their skins and shed their skins again to stay healthy and ahead. The message is that they are correct— what rises up will die and risks being risen again.”

To her credit, she pauses before she says this one, her eyes hard. “The message is that you have discoverable weaknesses. No necromancy, no  _ magic _ , should have gotten past your border wards. I saw them on the way in.”

In the back of his mind, he registers the regret he has that this will be amongst her last impressions of him, seeing him bothered by a threat he didn’t want to be bothered by, seeing his magic fail. He’s too coward to even answer her now, with the bridge down and Ogg and Rosmerta on the other side, staring anxiously at the Mage and the 78th. With a final flick of his wand, James summons the cursed arrow from its place and flings it into the water, never touching it. Together, he and Evans watch the banner announcing his death fall to the ground. 

“Burn that, would you?” James asks, striding away from her and the banner at her feet before she can react, just wishing, for once, to be alone. “It’s depressing.”

***

Damn it to the hells, maybe he  _ is  _ a coward. He’s hiding in his study (his father’s old one. His mother’s gets too drafty) instead of eating the plentiful dinner Rosmerta had prepared with her staff for the regiment. He’s hiding in his study to avoid Sirius and Remus and Peter on their last night as his guard, ignoring Lily, because he really doesn’t know how to say goodbye. He’s never had the opportunity before. Maybe those times were for the best. 

This isn’t so bad, really. He isn’t even hungry for the feast of chicken and wine and desserts like he hasn’t had since the spring. Not hungry again all. Besides, he’s spent countless autumn’s and winters with his house staff and Moody. The quiet isn’t all that bad, either. These are the times he gets to read most and cast scrolls and take inventory and read and cast and inventory and quiet and alone and—  _ fuck _ .

Maybe James  _ is  _ sitting rather pathetically with his head in his hands when the door to his study bursts open. Maybe it does take him a moment to register exactly what happens because it’s been a long day. 

Moody was in here a little while ago. James suspects he had already had half his flask before then and couldn’t fully blame him.

“Welcome home, boy,” Moody sighs, settling himself on his usual chair across from James at his desk— James, who is considering copying Moody and breaking into his office emergency supply. He supposes he’ll wait until dinner, though.

James just tips his head down in acknowledgment; he isn’t in the mood for company, not even Moody’s, who doesn’t seem to care about that minor inconvenience. James really just wanted to sit and snack on the chocolate-dipped dried citrus candy he found when rummaging through his office, a gift from the Mage of the Many not long before he left the Hallows for the summer. James’ll have to thank him for the treat again at their next Council meeting. 

“Some welcome, huh?”

“I don’t know how it happened,” James sighs into his hands, tucking his face there. What an embarrassment, what an utter failure of his own magic, what a dangerous thing for all of them. It’s for the best the 78th is leaving. “I don’t get it, Moody. My wards have never failed before.”

“Either they’re getting smarter or we’re getting dumber,” Moody grunts. He gives James a dark look from his good eye. “I owe you an apology. I don’t think it’s your wards that failed.”

“Moody, no.”

“Been thinking about it since that damned cleric. And then the Hollows get trespassed on the very morning you’re coming home? That’s not a coincidence.”

James  _ does  _ pull out his crystal glasses for the whiskey in his desk drawer, sets them out on his desk, pours from his decanter snuck in his drawer; he waits until he and Moody sip long enough in peace before he formulates his thoughts, rebuttal.

“The Man of Godric was in camp because of me,” James says firmly, clearly. “The wards failed because of my casting, not because of anyone else.”

“No,” Moody shakes his head. “The cleric snuck in during a training hour and during a guard rotation— a massive stroke of luck if it wasn’t proof of a leak. And even then, Potter, you can’t be so foolish as to think that whoever shot that banner at your bridge operated on pure luck; they must have known we were coming today.”

“Something the whole countryside could have guessed,” James emphasizes, trying not to roll his eyes. “We travel with nearly a hundred soldiers in the day, all on horseback. And beyond  _ that,  _ I told Ogg and Rosmerta our estimated arrival a fortnight ago.”

“Exactly, Potter!” Moody slams down his glass on James’ desk, empty. “That’s a hundred loose lips, a hundred suspicious characters, a hundred opportunities for Ogg or Rosmerta!”

“Or just a lot of opportunity for spying, for one small accidental slip,” James counters with excessive reason. “You always assume the worst before you assume the best, Moody.”

“Because it’s my job and I’m damn good at it,” Moody growls again, crossing his arms. “Too often you believe in the best in people, even when you’ve seen their worst.”

James doesn’t respond immediately to the insult; sometimes it’s true, sometimes it isn’t. He certainly thinks less people around him are Eaters or sympathizers than Moody tends to think.

“This isn’t about just anyone,” James shakes his head, trying to think. “This is the regiment we’ve traveled with for months. I’ve known some of them for years— you’ve known the Longbottoms for years!”

“Which might be what’s clouding our judgment.”

“I don’t think we have a leak.”

Moody doesn’t answer James this time. He clearly disagrees and there’s nothing James can do about it. Instead Moody changes the subject, surprising him. 

“You still have your medallion?”

James sets down his glass slowly, looks at Moody carefully. “How do you know about that?”

“‘Cause I know about it.”

James is unhappy with that response and lets Moody know it, too, pitting him with a look that  _ must  _ be something serious if it causes Mad-Eye to shrug and open up just a little bit to him. 

Moody rolls his good eye, leans back in his chair. “I know about the medallion because I told Dumbledore I wasn’t going to watch a sixteen year old idiot die on my watch.” Moody takes a swig, actually gives him a smirk rather than a grimace. “I was a hired mercenary for your mother, before you Mages had formal guards. I didn’t think I’d stick around this long. I just knew it’d be bad for business if I let a kid die under my guard. Dumbledore must’ve agreed with me.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Too bad,” Moody shakes his head. “You got it.”

“It makes no  _ sense,”  _ James throws himself back in his chair, feeling fully like the small kid Moody first starting working for. “Really. How would using it make me any different than them?”

“Because you haven’t used it yet. Because there’s a difference between a phoenix’s tear and necromancy and I’m not going to explain that concept to a Mage. You’re just being stubborn”

“ _ You  _ take the medallion, then, if you care about it so much.”

“Shut up,” Moody says, standing up now, stretching out his legs. “I have to meet with the Longbottoms. Got a bit to discuss with ‘em.”

James waits until Moody’s almost out the door. “Tell them goodbye for me, will you?”

Moody just grunts.

So he’s surprised at what happened next, not an hour later. He’s surprised that maybe something can work out for him even if it’s all for the wrong reasons.

“That settles it,” Alice declares, striding fully in the room, the heavy wooden door she’d thrown open swinging on its hinges. She looks at James with what seems like a triumphant smirk on her face, Moody and Frank piling in after her with decidedly less cheerful faces. But there aren’t many people as cheerful as Alice on the daily, so he’ll forgive them for it. “We’re staying.”

James looks up from his pity party of one, his head working slow but his heart beating fast. “But— but the 78th finished its contract.” 

“And it’s a poor job if we finish under any hint of suspicion,” Alice crosses her arms, leans against the wall, doesn’t care that she accidentally knocked over a book or two from the shelves, which Frank picks up with a small, hidden smile at his wife before his expression hardens again. “But we can fix that.”

“If you allow us to stay, that is,” Frank says, looking at James. “It’s admittedly a gamble for you, but I think we have a unique chance to see if there really is a leak in our ranks if we stay put in a safe space. Don’t you think, Moody?”

Moody, as expected, grunts in agreement, eloquent as always.

James tries to hide his excitement; he feels like he should act as concerned about the leak as they are. He responds to Frank with what he thinks is a very calm and hesitant counterpoint. 

“I thought you were headed to the Academy tomorrow morning.”

Frank shrugs. “The Head Mage will be fine. I’d already warned him we might be delayed. He has the Order— you don’t. And Alice is right. It’s a bloody waste of time for you to be killed so soon after we were to have left.”

James leans back in his chair, staring at his captains. His stomach growls. Maybe he  _ can  _ go enjoy that feast Rosmerta had her staff prepare. He can’t stop the smirk from spreading across his face. 

“I’m touched. I’m not even offended you don’t think I can keep myself alive without you.”

Frank rolls his eyes, subtly. “Don’t flatter yourself, Mage. At this rate, I’m not sure you can keep yourself alive  _ with _ us.”

That earns Frank a good, genuine laugh from James, his head tipped back in amusement. “Fair point, sir.”

“Mad-Eye says we’re on a record for longest lasting regiment,” Frank starts to smile, relaxed in James’ presence for once. James remembers him from school for the first time in a long time, a few years older than him. Augusta Longbottom should have been elected Mage if Dumbledore hadn’t changed the rules to let him assume the title despite being underaged. In another life, Frank is in his position, Mage and motherless. James envies Frank, envies his station as captain and husband. Anyway, Frank smiles bigger at James, holding out his hand to shake like they used to when they competed on different sports teams at the Academy. “Let’s see how far we can bring that record, hm? I love a good competition.” 

Shaking his hand, hungry, smiling, James thinks Frank had never been more agreeable in his eyes.

***

The Hollows are a joyous place. When the summer heat fully cools into the fall, there are fireplaces roaring and plenty of nights spent relaxed indoors in sturdy stone walls of hodgepodge bricks that feel like home again. Moody has the regiment run drills for combat and for siege protection, which alleviates whatever boredom Sirius had been feeling and gives Evans another strategy tactic to study and improve. Remus doesn’t have to spend a harsh winter in the wild and Peter gets free use of the kitchens to bake whenever Rosmerta isn’t too busy. There are nights where even Mad-Eye, for all his talk of constant vigilance, seems relaxed and in good spirits talking away with the Longbottoms or McKinnon or Dearborn.

In all the late nights and occasional hunting parties and Meadows pulling out her lute, in all the hours spent in the company of friends when he isn’t at his books, James remembers Sirius’ warning. He remembers it in ways he had not taken seriously enough before— how everyday he puts on these soft Mage’s robes and she puts on a similar mark of her station, different and hard. Time is precious. Life is precious. Rather than feeling invincible in this reprieve he has, this second chance he has, he feels so fragile, like all of this could be gone by the time he wakes up from another impossible dream. Sitting next to her, enjoying her company and nothing more, not even the thought of a promise of more, feels enough for him. Time is precious. Life is precious. He won’t risk anything, not when now feels like something good, something hopeful, something old and familiar and new. 

This is all life needs to be. Friends, food, and a warm place to sleep. Threats forgotten, banner forgotten, the world just a background thought to this new life. 

Which is precisely why it couldn’t last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello hello busy week busy time, will respond to what i haven't in the coming days! there's one more chapter in this 'part one' section
> 
> here's an educational page on violence against trans and non-binary people: https://vawnet.org/sc/serving-trans-and-non-binary-survivors-domestic-and-sexual-violence/violence-against-trans-and
> 
> and FORGE, which i've just learned abt! there's a donation button on the page: https://forge-forward.org/about/   
> FORGE provides training for victim service centers and support for trans survivors of interpersonal violence, meaning it seems like an org doing crucial work and that's trying to make the world a better place. 
> 
> and maybe if you need something to lift your spirits, i made a pumpkin cheesecake last week and it was great! here's the recipe (you need a springform pan): https://natashaskitchen.com/pumpkin-cheesecake-recipe/


	8. Snakes, Eaters, and You

Actually, the day had started out pretty good. Really good, if he were being completely honest. Peter made sticky buns and Sirius joined them in the kitchen during his break and Remus could finally be convinced that actually using his dad’s materials in the old lab would be a better legacy for him than having them sit idle as they had been for so many years. He’d responded to the Council’s most recent bout of letters in record time, done more research on his wards, and even relocated the peonies in his mother’s garden to better brave the oncoming chill. 

All in all, it was a good day. One of those _good_ days, the kind of day that makes the rest of them make sense again. Like how when he _did_ have to attend back to his work, it was Lily on duty sitting casually in his threshold, her hair braided behind her back— good like how the sight of her felt like a things clicking into place, some ancient and forgotten part of him that had been swallowed by grief and duty reawakened to the fact that he’s young and still has room in his heart for things other than concern for the state of the world, promise or no promise. There’s time. Time is precious, life is precious. _Good_ in the way that time and its infinite possibilities seemed unending in that good way, like they had nothing _but_ time to stay just like this or grow into something new, something old and familiar and good as well. 

He never should have trusted it. 

***

“Just one more,” James says, wiping his hands clean, smiling with satisfaction at the blue glowing rune in the grass. It gives off a faint glow and if he really focuses his senses, he can feel the arcane pulsing with energy in the air, can feel the remaining bits of power flow through his finger tips, especially from the cut on his palm that aided the ritual. 

These outer runes aren’t cast in solid gold, but he thinks they’ll manage just fine. Evans, who hadn’t been with him for any of the other casting, still has her eyes trained on the patch of grass where he’d just drawn his ward. 

“What’ve you changed since your last casting, Potter? It's different from when we passed this one on the way here.”

“Good perception,” James compliments genuinely, unsurprised, casual, as he pulls out his chart from Sirius’ bag and marks the updated ward. Sirius, for his part, is pretending to nap against a tree since it’s just the three of them out here. James pities him; of course he knows he isn’t really sleeping. Sirius snores. He just refuses to believe he does and never deigns to snore during feints, which is rather sloppy prank work if James had any say on the matter (which he did and does. And it’s sloppy work). Anyway, Evans is inspecting the rune carefully, trying to read the fading blue glow as she carefully walks the circle. 

“What do you think I added?”

“You’ve reinforced the sensory charm,” she muses quietly, like she was pulling apart the translation out loud as she spoke. “That much is obvious. But the anti-illusion block is definitely new… and wait a second.” She looks up at him in confusion. “This symbol in the middle. Why are you blocking divine magics?”

He crosses his arms, leans against his horse. “You really were the cleverest of us, you know.”

“Still am,” Lily says smugly back to him, smirking and smiling for a moment. “But you didn’t answer me.”

He likes that she’s pushing him. She’s being far more forward and curious about the arcane than most are allowed to be; the Mages are increasingly tight lipped about magic with each passing year, even to old teachers or family or acquaintances. He likes her asking, not only because he gets to show-off (it’s an unfair advantage, he knows that, but he’ll take it anyway) but because James Potter remembers Lily Evans, baker’s daughter, former student. She’s a current foot soldier but she’ll always be a student to him. 

“The anti-illusion field is self-explanatory. It also blocks _my_ illusions, but I’ve never cared for them anyway. I don’t hide behind false images. That's cowardice.” 

“And the divine magic?”

James stands from leaning against his horse, walks around her instead, patting her side gently. 

“Is the divine really magic?” James asks, a question he’s posed to Dumbledore on several occasions and gotten infuriating, circular non-answers in response. “I’m serious,” he adds, seeing Lily’s cocked eyebrow. Takes him a moment to realize she had it raised to consider his question, not to criticize. 

“It’s easy to call everything that changes the state of things magic,” Lily answers after a long pause, looking down at his runes, no longer glowing or pulsing with energy, barely visible in the grass now. “It’s easy to understand the world as extensions of one arcana, because that’s easy to control. That’s what we got taught, at least. It’s easier to manipulate if you think there really isn’t any difference between alchemy or divination or runes or binding or whatever have you but… I don’t know how true that is,” she turns to look at him now, her expression, for some reason… blank. Like she’s thinking too hard. Like she’s thought about this and it matters and she doesn’t want to show that. “If the divine _is_ magic, then everything we see in the world is magic. And if everything is magic, then why is it _arcane_ magic? Why isn’t it all just ‘divine?’ And what if it isn’t either?”

“Because the divine is weak and has been for centuries,” he shrugs, an easy answer to find. “Because the divine hasn’t been the leading magic since the Old Days, unlike the arcane, which— current days not withstanding— _hasn’t_ weakened.”

“I know that,” Evans bites her lip, still thinking. Maybe to have something to do, she fools around with the pack they’ve brought, re-attaches it to her horse. They’ll have to ride again soon if they’re to finish the last ward as planned, but he thinks they have time for this. He thinks, foolishly, that this is like how it used to be, that they have time and space to challenge one another, better one another. He thinks they have time. 

Anyway, Evans is still biting her lip. She’s calculating her next words carefully. 

“No, I don’t know that,” she blurts, the words coming out fast. “We have no idea what the last decade has done to the arcane, just like we have no idea what happened to the divine. You’re focusing on power, Potter, on strength versus weakness. I don’t care about that. I’m thinking more about source and impact and purpose. I’ve been thinking about that cleric—“

“I wish you wouldn’t.”

“—and why he was in the camp in the first place.” 

This time, it’s James who is looking for something to do to avoid eye contact. He looks over at Sirius, still pretending to sleep. Maybe he isn’t pretending. Maybe he’s grown out of snoring and they _do_ have privacy right now in a way they haven’t in months. Inconvenient. He might wake Sirius up just to avoid her looking at him too closely like she is. 

“What was it that he said to you?” The question has clearly been in her head for a long time now, long enough for a wound to be in her chest and now no longer. Long enough to think it important to remember, long enough to think it important to ask him when he’s weak to her, alone. “About restoring the divine? About _you_ doing so?”

“I’m sorry you even remember the words of a fanatic,” he sighs, running a hand through his hair. “You know I regret that day.”

“I’m not asking you to regret that day,” Lily challenges, narrowing her eyes at him. “I’m asking you what the cleric meant when he said that.”

“And I told you my answer. The words of a fanatic don’t mean a single thing outside his own logic.” He looks back at her, lying through his teeth. “All Followers blame the arcane for the weakness of their orders. I hardly see why that has to be my concern, especially when we have the means of medicine for our wounds and potioneering and herbology for the rest.”

“Well. He certainly believed that the divine is a magic _you_ could do. He believed that you couldn’t do any until you abandoned the arcane. He believed in their separation.”

James looks at her, closely. Really looks at her. Behind her tone, analytical and somewhat detached, he wants to believe he can read more into her motives, her real thoughts, but he can’t. That’s something about her that has changed in this last decade. Lily Evans, school girl, wore her heart on her sleeve. He knew every thought in her head the moment it arrived, revealing itself on her face in an instant. He can’t read Lily Evans, foot soldier. He supposes that when this war is over, the politicians and poets and people won’t know this loss and it won’t be calculated into the list of casualties in the way he thinks it should. Easiness, openness, vulnerability, sincerity, kindness…. who mourns the loss of authenticity? Who counts the death of childhood innocence as a tragedy rather than necessity?

James steps closer to her, boot landing softly in the grass, something he notices because the rest of the world feels so quiet and still when he’s so focused in on her like this. The closer he steps to her, the more she has to point her chin up, sharp and proud, to look him in the eye with that same hard expression on her face. Maybe it isn’t hard. Maybe it’s just stubborn. 

They’re standing very close. There’s a short piece of hair at her temple that’s curled up in a ringlet, pretty and singular. He thinks about Lily Evans, school girl. He thinks he doesn’t have to mourn her yet. 

He wants to tuck it back behind her ear. He wants to be able to touch her like that, casually, intimately. He wants to think that if he were to lift his hand to tuck her hair back, she’d lean her cheek into the palm of his hand, casually, intimately. He knows if she did that he’d be holding more power in that hand than he’d ever yielded before, cradled, cherished, adored. 

He doesn’t hold his hand out for her. He doesn’t want to yield that power, not yet, not while the world is so wrong. But he still wants to know her in the ways he remembers her and the ways he’s come to encounter now, new and good.

“What do you believe, then?” He asks, something quiet, as his eyes dart between hers for an answer because they’re so close together, as her eyes dart between his because they’re too close for her to focus on him all at once. _This_ he thinks might be divine, the thought of knowing her. “You’re curious for a reason. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I don’t know anything,” she steps back, shrugging her shoulders. The thrall is lifted, subtly, in the way she holds her hands up, throwing aside her questions like they didn’t matter, like they weren’t important. “I’m no Mage. I’m no cleric. I’m just a soldier in your guard.”

“Don’t,” James takes another step forward, repairing what she’d done to their moment. He disguises the motion of his hand reaching out to her by making it adjust his glasses instead before dropping it down pathetically at his side. “Stop doing that.”

If he isn’t mistaken, she’s the one who takes the step closer to him this time, incremental and monumental. “What? Pointing out the truth?”

“Purposely devaluing yourself,” he corrects, furrowing his brow, constantly trying to figure her out. She pulled the same move on him after the Crouch incident. Something feels like it’s clicking into place, some puzzle pieces feel illuminated for this one small moment, gears turning in his head, really looking at her. “You make yourself small in the face of big questions, like you’re hiding—“

That’s when a carrot gets thrown at his head. It hits him near the eye, point first. 

The moment in shattered, gossamer string holding them together no match for angry root vegetables.

“Hello, Sirius,” James deadpans, turning to see his alleged best mate standing and stretching innocently like he hadn’t just attacked him (again). Maybe it wasn’t a moment to begin with. Evans scurries away from him faster and smoother than he thought possible. James sighs, tries not to feel annoyed at Sirius for being himself. “Enjoy your nap?” 

“It wasn’t a nap,” Sirius says, his helmet in his hands like he didn’t just weaponize vegetation against him. “You two successfully managed to bore me to death. I was sent back by Godric himself to deliver an important message: I’m hungry.”

“Seems like you have plenty vegetables to snack on if you didn’t waste them.”

“Shut up,” Sirius shrugs dismissively, pulling out more carrots, handing one to his horse. “You know these are for Buckbeak.”

“Here, seems you’ve dropped one—“

Sirius does successfully pry the carrot from James’s hand before James can successfully stab his best friend’s eye out with it. He thinks it would have been justified. With a huff, Sirius glares at James, holding the reclaimed carrot out for Buckbeak. 

“I’m serious,” he says, grabbing Buckbeak’s reins in his hands. Behind him, not looking at either one of them, Evans is on her horse ready to ride again. “We have another ward to cast. We’re losing light.”

“Sorry,” James says, grabbing his pack from wear or lie near his horse, looking away from the both of them to lie again. “I was just explaining to Evans that I think the Hollows are too close to Doge and his Men to risk anything. That's why I warded us against the divine.”

“Yes,” Sirius says, edge to his voice despite his practiced bored tone. “That’s all you were doing.”

“Come on,” James kicks his horse into motion. “We aren’t far from the final rune circle. It won’t take long.”

He did really mean that. It’s funny how time works, how minutes can be fast or slow, significant or mind boggling boring. (That’s not true, of course. Every minute is significant. Time is precious. Life is precious. Sometimes you’re just blessed to be aware of it in the moment as it’s happening). This ride went fast, these last minutes of sense, of seeming insignificance. He wishes this was one of those times he could have known to take a final look at Sirius looking like a dark hero in a storybook on giant black Buckbeak. He wishes he had looked over at Lily just one more time in addition to the glances he stole just to remember what she looked like in her full armor, sword at her side, his insignia blazed on both their chests. He doesn’t notice any of those things in the moment. He’s a fool. He thinks they have time, the mistake they’ve made over and over and over again with one another. It isn’t until they reach the rune circle that things start to feel significant. 

“Wait,” James commands, pulling his horse up to stop short in front of Lily and Sirius, startling their mounts, which Buckbeak hates and makes sure James knows he hates. “Something’s wrong.”

James dismounts, holding his hand up at them as a signal to stay seated. He pulls out his wand, holding it aloft, stepping hesitantly towards his rune circle. The air feels different, like he’d stepped into a memory long forgotten. Something’s wrong. He doesn’t need to detect magic to know that. Something’s wrong and it’s infuriatingly familiar and he can’t place it, like a taunt. All magic stays familiar. When he gets close enough to his rune circle to see a faint line of black smoke rising from it, he can appreciate the taunt underlying the danger. Eaters are better at disguising their magic than this. This one left an arcane signature on their necromancy mark that he just can’t fucking remember. 

It’s a good taunt. It’s a good threat. Whatever Eater placed it here knew James enough to know he’d stop to inspect the curse on his ward longer than would be wise so that the next part of the orchestration could have maximum effect. That’s another thing he can appreciate right now. The Eaters can put on a good show when they want. 

“Can you fix it?” Sirius calls from his place on his horse, trying to calm Buckbeak, who still won’t settle.

“Yes. But I need time. I think we’ll have to come back.”

“We need to tell Moody,” Evans voice pipes in, after James stood up from his inspection of the rune. The identity of the necromancy mark holds more of his attention and ire than the fact that his ward is not only known but damaged. That’s a problem. Something’s wrong. 

James stands up, wipes his hands on his robes, tucks his wand in his pocket. Turns back to Sirius and Lily and the horses.

Turns in time to see the first snake rear up out of the grass, knee-high and intelligent, waiting. The first is quickly followed by the second, third, fourth and fiftieth snake raising its head up in the grass, all staring at them, unblinking. All between him and them. 

James looks from the snakes back to his friends. This is a moment that matters, he knows, so he _does_ take this moment to take Sirius in, sitting like a dark hero on Buckbeak. He looks as steely as the plate that protects him. James takes a moment to take Lily in and the blazing look on her face as she takes _him_ in rather than looking at the snakes. 

His command to them is simple and leaves no room for question. His command is a reminder to each of them that he’s Mage, not just some charge, not just some politician, but Great Mage, One of Nine, Last of His Line. The spell is already at the tip of wand, the air around him thrumming in response, his robes billowing around him. He doesn’t need to yell to know they hear him, to believe they’ll listen. 

“Run.” 

They charge for the Hollows the same moment the snakes lunge for him and the blast erupts from his wand, the same moment his spare hand is already signing his next casting, the same moment several things click into his mind and the next steps of this battle— because that’s what this is, not some pitiful assassination attempt— come into his mind. In throwing his next spell off with all the righteous fury he can muster at the moment, James is rewarded with quiet. No new snakes appear; the dead stay dead. No Eaters around to resurrect them, _yet._

James throws his insignia in the sky. It gives away his location, maybe, but the most important thing it does is alert the Hollows, which responds in kind just a moment later, siege horns blowing something awful across his solitary countryside. He knows what he has to do next, which is secure the Hollows. He knows what he’d _like_ to do next, which is teleport directly back to Lily and Sirius just to make sure they make it back to secure the Hollows with him. 

He is a Great Mage, One of Nine, Last of His Line. When he turns on his heel, he arrives directly onto the main defensive turret at the Hollows, surrounded by the bustle of activity that precedes any battle with castle staff running inside for shelter and soldiers taking positions. He spies a guard captain in record time, eyes working with him for once. 

“Praise to Godric and his ways,” Alice breathes out, taking him in. “We might have a chance with you here now.” She brings her horn closer to her mouth, yelling, “Close the gates!”

“No!” James yells, pulling down her horn. “Lily and Sirius are still out there!”

She looks at him like he’s suddenly grown horns like the one in her hand.

“I am not risking the rest of the regiment for two guards. I’m sorry, sir. They wouldn’t expect me to, either.”

James looks at Alice, rapid calculations of a horses’ speed and their distance from the camp going in his head, rapid calculations of how two lives _could_ matter more to him than an entire regiment’s, how maybe it isn’t about valuing one life or another and maybe it’s about trust in his friends and trust that there is still enough good in the world that this will work out for them.

“We aren’t closing them until they’re inside the moat,” James declares, standing at his full height, standing at his full power. He’s Mage. This is _his_ guard. “Mage’s order, Captain.”

Alice sets her jaw, turns away from him. “Fine. Everyone else, in position!”

And that was that. 

The last good thing that happened occurred as black smoke started billowing over the horizon, their most classic scare tactic, building and building, a way to both disguise and inflate their number and advantage. Every lantern that can possibly be lit on top this turret has an enchanted blue flame in it to resist their artificial darkness. James has cast additional orbs of light over the Hollows, did the best he can to help Moody and the Longbottoms in the short notice they had. He thinks nothing he did to help here could compare to the flare of hope that came riding horseback, two reprieves, two advanced soldiers whose ride into the Hollows signals the Eaters to advance as well, moving like a rolling storm cloud directly behind Sirius and Lily. The second he can see them cross the threshold of the drawbridge below him, James sends down a shield barrier; the drawbridge might be able to be pulled up in time before the Eaters can pass, and his shield drained more from him than he would have liked it to. It _is_ a gamble, what he’s ordered his captain to do, and all he can do is hope it was worth it. 

That was the last good thing before the drawbridge burned, the last good thing before cursed arrows flew above the Hollows’ walls, the last good thing before the dark cloud of black smoke became individual Eaters supported by their own foot soldiers in onyx armor, a snake for their crest. This isn’t an assassination attempt, though his death surely must be amongst their priorities. This is a battle. This is a raid. He doesn’t want to believe it might be a massacre. 

The dark around them is thick as smoke, filling his lungs, stinging his eyes. The light he’d cast for his guard is fading too quickly, the clanging and clamoring of metal too intense for his ears. Dearborn and Meadows and their crew is doing their best to defend against the onslaught of arrows still being hailed overhead, but Eater forces have breached the shield wall or have managed to carry themselves over the turret walls. Moody is toe to toe with a goliath of an onyx armored soldier whose claymore looks big enough to fell a tree. Frank and Alice are shoving off the advancing infantry from the wall as quickly and efficiently as possible, but James can sense that things are going to get so much worse before they ever get any better. Eaters almost never do raids— their numbers aren’t actually all that high by the Council’s best estimates and they like to keep the illusion of omnipresence by sending out small groups. What they do know of raids comes from reports from the small number of survivors. 

This is only the beginning of the insurgency. This is just the guard, the infantry. Next comes the Turned. Then the necromancers. 

James is doing is best to balance defensive with offensive tactics, doing his best to keep moving, but it’s quickly become evident to him that he isn’t the only one overwhelmed and disoriented, especially when the air around them shifts to an unnatural chill, when the moat below starts to moan and move in an unnatural way, when the first Turned jumps out and up to drag one of his down into the depths, unnatural, horrifying. More chaos ensues from how the lower ranking guard, the least experienced and the ones who joined in drafts or to pay fines or because of mistaken ideas about what glory and honor is. James is too late in trying to grab the soldier who was taken. It eats him up inside, the guilt, knowing that was someone who didn’t have to die if the world weren’t like this, if he had been better, faster. 

It’s looking down into the moat where the soldier went down that has him distracted enough to be taken by surprise by an onyx soldier grabbing him right behind him, by a sword raised up—

Then he’s on the ground, two knives in his eyes.

“Good to see you,” James breathes out, his heart racing. Sirius retrieves his bloody knives from the dead with a grimace before he tucks them back into their holster on his chest. 

“Can’t say the same,” Sirius huffs, pulling his sword out. “You should go,” he says, quickly and quietly, the cacophonous noise of battle still surrounding them. “Get out of here. Get to Hogsmeade or the Academy.”

“ _No,”_ James shakes his head, breathing hard. He hasn’t had to use this much magic, this many high intensity spells, in a long while. 

“Listen to me,” Sirius hisses, “I don’t know if this is winnable. I know it isn’t worth you dying in.”

“Then it’s not worth anyone dying for,” James knocks past him, moving back to the moat to shoot fire down to try to keep the Turned at bay. 

“He won’t go,” he hears Sirius say behind his back. 

“Idiot,” comes the response. Lily.

A different noise, one that stands out amongst this chaos, stops the response out his mouth to them. Somewhere in the distance— or not in the distance, somewhere right behind him and somewhere to his left and to his right or somewhere inside his fucking head— there’s laughter. It is cold, high pitched. It’s the lich. Near, here. 

That’s when Eaters in greater number than before storm the turret, yielding more than just cursed arrows but full blasting spells fueled by necrotic energy.

They don’t have time to argue any further tightening their tanks together like the rest of the 78th, which now seems small and few, the air around them thick and difficult to breath in. They don’t have time, and yet, they are.

“Go!” Evans yells, toe to toe with one of the onyx armored soldiers bigger than her, “Run! We’ll hold them off!”

“No!” He yells back, pushing his hair out of his face. Dumbledore, Moody, Sirius, Lily, all the same; they think he is not disposable. They think he isn’t the one who should die first, the one who should be dead instead of the hundreds of nameless dead instead. And all the while, the laughter is getting louder and more disorienting. James slaps his hands together, muttering under his breath, trying to locate the source. If the lich is here, there won’t be any point for heroism. There’ll just be those lucky enough to be dead and those who got Turned. 

His spell finds the source. He can feel a path to the lich form in his mind and he starts on it without thought, without much awareness, just the knowledge in his head that he’ll take him down with his own fists if he can manage it. Sirius and Lily follow him, a stupid decision that he knows he can’t stop like they must know what he is doing as they head directly into the thick of things, metal clanging, people yelling and screaming, guard fighting guard. 

And it works at first. The 78th is emboldened by his aggressive move to regain ground in order to reach the lich, by the round of spells he’s finding a second energy for and it seems like they’re successful at pushing the onyx army and Eaters off the turrets. They reclaim the stairwell down to the drawbridge. They reclaim the drawbridge, Moody with him now, the Longbottoms yelling orders, Sirius at his right and Lily at his left, their swords bloody, shields marred from the initial aerial attack.

But he can’t protect them from the moat. He didn’t lie to Lily earlier, not the whole time, about Godric’s Men and the divine— the divine _would_ be helpful in healing the Turned, in cleansing the moat, in putting death back into its rightful balance and place in the order of things. His meager protection spells, his attempts at cleansing— no matter how heartfelt of an effort— can’t rid the moat of the Turned. And when they make their passage over the drawbridge, his fire isn’t enough to protect the rear. He knows they’ve lost more than he could ever justify, especially given what happens next. 

The lich is here and he _knows_ it, he knows it in the laughter which rattled his thoughts even now after he’d done his best to cast it away, he knows it in the acrid way the air tastes and smells, in the black muck that they have to trudge through in this open field instead of the verdant green it had once been, the same fields he’d once rolled around in with Sirius and the rest of his family desiccated, devoid of the life it once fostered. 

The lich is here and he knows it in the way that the necromancers’ curses are more powerful, more vile, more potentially decaying than he’d ever had the misfortune to know. The lich is here because he finally lays eyes on him, the only Eater with his hood down, the only Eater who could look back at him with fully inhuman eyes and face because his head isn’t that of a human’s but fully of that of a snake. He has no wand, just two human hands dripping in black decay, two curses ready at his fingertips. 

The lich is the only Eater strong enough and smart enough to do the one thing that ensures that this could never be a fair fight. He aims his next two curses directly at James, not at his head, not at his chest, but at his wand arm. 

A lot of things happen at once that his brain has trouble reasoning itself around. There’s still the noise of battle, there’s still the echoing laughter, but there’s the added smell of rotting flesh and of blood and of burning smoke. There’s the taste of bile in his mouth from guilt, from fear. There’s the rush of adrenaline in the fluid motion of his arm as he attempts to counter spell the lich and then there is the confusion that typically accompanies chaos like the sort of madness he must be compelled by to try such a direct attack on the lich. There’s the knowledge that something has gone significantly wrong, that something is missing, something is broken.

Something wrong. Fundamentally. And the lich is holding up his hand again, laughing again, and this must be it, what the end looks like.

But still, he hears her voice, yelling his name. Not his title, no mocking _sir_ or _Great Mage or Greatest Mage?_ Just Lily Evans yelling “ _James!”_ and the feeling of her armored arms wrapping around him before the explosion.

At least, that’s what he thought _must_ have happened. Because he loses his vision, loses a sense of sound and touch, for far more than a moment. Feels like a lifetime. And when the ringing in his ears stops and light comes back to him, they aren’t outside the Hollows any more. They aren’t surrounded by Eaters. The woods that greet his eyes are different, even, probably because these aren’t woods; they’re at the edge of a swamp and everything is still, quiet.

And then there’s Lily. Screaming. _Screaming._ His ears stop ringing in time for his heart to stop beating. This must be it, what the end looks like, but he isn’t in pain, _she_ is.

She’s covered in flower petals. He looks down at his hands, his robes— so is he. He’s never produced flower petals like this. They aren’t his. Magic feels a certain way and this isn’t his magic. 

He’s covered in flower petals dropping off his robes and she’s covered in them too, pretty pink petals that turn black in the most terrifying fashion on her chest, which is smoking. That is, it’s rotting. Lily Evans is covered in mystery magic flower petals in the middle of a swamp they weren’t in a second ago and her chest plate is rotting off her chest because of the burning, festering necrotic wound at her back. She’s on her knees, dropped right in front of him, collapsed on the ground after sinking down, where only seconds or lifetimes ago her arms had been completely wrapped around him. Guarding him.

“Li— _Lily!”_

Nothing really matters right now, not even his awareness that so little of right now makes a lick of sense. He was supposed to be dead or worse, and something still feels wrong and missing, and she’s screaming in an unfamiliar marsh, and none of that really matters right now. The only thing that matters right now is the curse about to Turn Lily Evans.

“Hold on— fuck _,_ Lily, I’m so sorry, you have to help me get the armor off, I don’t— _fuck—“_

His hands are scrambling at the buckles of her chest plate, he has to get it off, he has to get to the wound so she’ll stop screaming, stop dying—

Actually, it’s easy to rip off a metal plate from the back that’s half eroded. His next decision is easy too, ripping the necklace from its safe space tucked in his robes, cracking the wooden medallion in two like it was always meant to be. It’s even easier to breathe when opalescent liquid drops onto the gaping wound in her back and it immediately stops smoking black. 

Lily, on her hands and knees, stops screaming. When she looks back up at James, her face is devoid of color, pale pale pale as death, even her freckles gone, her cheeks now too sharp, her once sharp eyes shallow. She looks between James’ blackened and bloodied hands, the broken wooden medallion, and collapses in a heaving huff to the ground, visibly shaken, the wound down her back no longer smoking and no longer spreading, skin closed and black. 

Another thing. Her hair. It's _white._ Godric above, her brilliant auburn hair has turned stark, frosty white.

“What was that?” She croaks, her voice nearly gone. 

“Phoenix tear,” James says quietly, staring down at her with both shock and horror. Impossible things try to click into place in his brain. It’s still hard to think, Lily sitting now, hunched over, her armor sullied, the chest plate barely hanging off her. She doesn’t have the energy to fully rip it off, lets it hang in front of her uncomfortably. They’re both breathing heavily, not saying a single word. 

“Can you— do you have water?”

Silently, James takes his small flask from his hip, holds it down for her. She swallows it down in one gulp, water dripping out of her mouth down her chin, leaving a clean line from the grime there. When she looks back up at him, her face once so familiar and now so not, not because of the death haunting there but because of those impossible things coming into place in his mind. 

“Do you have any more?”

“That was it.”

“Summon some, I don’t care it’ll taste like shit—“

“I can’t,” he grits out through clenched teeth. “I don’t have my wand.”

Lily’s eyes go wide, big green orbs sunken into her face, set against the purple under her eyes, her cheeks pulled, all set against white hair. Those eyes are looking back to his hands, empty but for her blood he couldn’t smear off on his robes. 

“Godric,” Lily breathes out, almost wheezing. “Welcome to the club.”

He snaps.

“Lily,” James starts, perfectly polite and curious. “Where are we? And how did we get here?”

She doesn’t answer him, and that’s confirmation that she knows. She knows something. They aren’t in the middle of fucking nowhere in terrain that defies anything he’s ever known to be in Gryffindor because of the lich and they aren’t covered in pink flower petals because of the lich. She knows more than she’s letting on and always has. 

“Lily,” James repeats, a warning. 

She whispers out her confession, hugging her arms around her legs. Her voice is weak, hoarse. Guilty. 

“It was the only thing I could think of doing.”

“An Eater trick?” James nearly bellows, hand in his hair, standing right in front of her so that she has to look all the way up at him to see how angry he is. Now that her skin isn’t smoking and she isn’t screaming and he can’t see her back, he can think a little more clearly, but none of this makes any fucking sense. “Lily, _you used magic._ You— you teleported us out like it was _nothing.”_

“It isn’t what you think!” She defends, tugging at her chest plate til it’s ripped off and from waist up she’s just in what’s left of her leather under armor an incomplete, hodgepodge image of grime and blood and dripping black gunk with the face of near death.

“I think it’s exactly what I think,” he puffs his chest out, fuming, angry, indignant. Beneath that, betrayed. 

“ _No,”_ Lily cuts him off with more force than he thought her voice could muster. “If I didn’t get us out of there,” she seathes, angry. She’s still bleeding and just transported them across the continent and she has the energy to get _angry_ right now, to stand up right now, to poke her finger at him now. James would be impressed if he also weren’t so mad. “If I didn’t get us out there, you’d be dead right now. Forget about that blasted curse, which _you’re welcome_ for taking. We were outnumbered, surrounded, and losing. I did what I had to do.”

But James is still looking at her, horrified, and it must break through to some part of her, because she doesn’t look so angry anymore. She looks more scared, like the reality of what she’s done is crashing quickly around her. 

“I’m not an Eater,” she says, then, quickly, emphatically, she adds, “James. You _know_ I’m not an Eater.”

He crosses his arms, tucking the same hands that are coated in her blood into his robes, wishing for some sort of control. “I actually don’t.” 

“I’ve had plenty of time to kill you before this. _And_ I didn’t even kill you!”

“Waiting for the perfect opportunity, then?” He doesn’t care she’s made a fair point. He has no idea what reasonable and fair means right now, so he crosses his arms at her, tries to not feel like they’ve been transported back to the Academy all those years ago, arguing over nothing in the hallways. “Why not try now, Lily, I’m without my wand!”

“I don’t _want_ to kill you, idiot,” she bites out, grimacing. He’s pushing her. He shouldn’t and he knows that but he’s pushing her to the brink so that she might be able to meet him there. The look she puts him with does make him feel small, young, nothing. Her tone is scathing, despite the weakness in her voice, the desperation she must feel right now for reef and reprieve. “This is exactly why we never told you. You are so focused on your hatred of Eaters that you’ve lost sight of what this war is really about. You’re too mired in tradition and in Dumbledore’s teaching to see past what Crouch said and to see the _good,_ the usefulness, the _rightness_ of this, of magic, of—“

James holds his hand up, cutting her off. “What do you mean _we?_ Who else knows?”

Lily doesn’t answer him. She turns her head, looking away from him, tears welling up in her eyes. He knows. 

“Sirius,” James breathes out, those final pieces coming into place. “You and Sirius. That’s what you were… you were practicing magic.” He pauses. The tea. He isn’t just indignant now. This is hurt like he’d been hit in the stomach. “You both lied to me.”

“We didn’t want to lie. I _asked_ you to consider wandless magic, I begged you to think about what it could do—“

“Which is _destroy—“_

 _“_ Destruction has two sides to it,” she cuts him off, like this is a purely theoretical hypothetical debate they’re having. “The whole world cannot be defined by entropy. You know that. You know there is a balance in things.”

“A balance that has been thrown away by the same people who taught you this is possible!”

“An unfortunate association born of, frankly, an understandable necessity!” Lily strides up to him, looking every bit the part of someone who was almost torn apart, being every part of _her_ , still able to hold her ground. “What the Eaters did was figure out how to re-enter a world you Mages forced us out of. What the Eaters did was prove that limiting magic to so few _did_ break it, and then what _you_ did was ensure that we’d never be able to catch up, that we’d never be able to restore balance when so much of the scale had been artificially tipped in their favor just for you to maintain an illusion of control.”

The words are out of her mouth so easily, so quickly, that his anger, fear-filled brain doesn’t fully know how to respond. What he knows is she’s been holding back, that she’s been wanting to say these things to him or to the Head Mage himself but couldn’t. Another distracting thing, his wand arm _hurts._ Beyond the fact it’d been hit with a blast to rid him of his wand, he’s come to find out Sirius was right. It feels like he’s missing a limb. 

A limb she figured out how to regrow. 

He opens his mouth again— they’re well practiced in this and both out of their wits enough to keep this going, and beyond that, he wants to keep fighting. That makes a lot more sense to him than whatever else is going on. But he’s cut off from the look she gives him, hard, dismissive. An almost complete condemnation of him, an easy way to throw away his sense of authority and strength in this moment (and frankly, ever). Her hoarse voice is actually steady when she says through narrowed eyes, “If you are defenseless without your wand, you aren’t the James Potter I knew. You aren’t the James Potter I remember.” 

“And I have no idea who you are,” James says quietly back, blinking at her. Forget about memory. Forget about the past few months. The realization takes more of the wind out of him. He has no idea who Lily Evans is or what she’s capable of. 

“No,” Lily says, crossing her arms, too. “Maybe you don’t.”

They’re both quiet for a moment after that, two strangers lost in the same time, in the same marsh, in the same war and same problems. James finds himself pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Alright. Well. Can you bring us back?”

Lily closes her eyes. She looks frayed at the edges. He thinks maybe he’s pushed his luck with her a little too far, a poor move, considering he’s positive she could take him out if she wanted, even exhausted like she is.

“I can’t,” Lily tells him. Sounds properly distressed about it, too. “What I did was— it’s hard to explain, I really don’t know that much myself, but I think what I did was a one time thing. At least for a while.”

“A while? How long is a while?” 

“I don’t know,” she bites her lip. “That took.... That took a lot out of me. A month?”

“A _month?”_

Lily winces. “Maybe two?”

“Fantastic,” James says, letting bitterness fully seep into his tone, “We’re in the middle of nowhere with no supplies and no connections while the Hollows falls.”

That’s what remains of his anger now, most of all, beyond the fact that she’s right about a lot of things, but is how she took him out of a winless fight. She didn’t let him die with the others for his own home. She didn’t let him put an end to this charade, to the constant cycle of death and violence he sits witness to. She didn’t let him die. 

But then. He didn’t let _her_ die. Who controls death? 

James doesn’t know how long they’re like this in the marsh, standing very close but not looking at one another, not talking to one another, before she breaks the silence. 

“I am sorry,” Lily says very quietly. Turning around, he sees her staring down at her hands on her lap, fingers twisted into knots. “I’m sorry that we have no idea where I took us, I’m sorry I couldn’t grab Sirius in time, I’m sorry you can’t trust me.” Her voice is thick, watery. When she looks up at him, her eyes are bright, welling up. “I’m _sorry._ But my back really, really, really hurts and all I want to do is curl up right now and cry myself to sleep. Will it be terribly awful to reserve the rest of your accusations of treason for tomorrow?” 

She’s exhausted. There’s tears running down her cheeks and he’s never been great at seeing her cry. He’s exhausted, too. They have so much to do. 

“Alright…” James nods slowly. The sun hasn’t set here where they are, yet, which narrows down their location towards the west; more bad news. He sighs. They have so much to do. “Yeah. I’m going to— I’m going find some firewood.”

She doesn’t respond. She can’t— her face is in her hands, sitting hunched over again, sobbing. 

He leaves her to it. 

***

It’s fully dark by the time she falls asleep. He stays by her side for a long time, longer than maybe necessary or even appropriate, but enough time to ensure that she wasn’t going to stir awake soon. The fire he’d built crackles happily into the evening, mocking him. It will be their only warmth for the night and the thing that marks them as travelers off the main road for robbers or worse (if there _is_ a main road. He had no idea where they are). If he had his wand, he could do any number of things for them. Disguise the fire, summon blankets, create a tent in a pocket dimension, _anything._ Instead he listens to her jagged breathing slow and relax into more steady beats while his own heart hasn’t stopped racing. He registers that he’s afraid. For the first time in a long time, James Potter doesn’t have a clue as to how this will end for him. His heart pounds in more than fear, in emotions his mind can’t fully form words for and in feelings his heart finds are too big to handle itself. 

He doesn’t need his heart to fully catch up to his mind for right now; they need a plan, a scheme, anything, if they’re going to make it out of here, if they're going to see what happened to the Hollows. That he feels betrayed and can’t figure out why, that he feels lost in more ways than just physical does not matter if they can’t make it home. 

He walks through a small clearing, plan forming. They have so much to do. His next steps are laid out in his mind with each bend of his knee forward, each footprint on the earth from heel to toe, the possibilities of their failure endless and of their success only narrowly possible. He smiles, actually, unwillingly, his thoughts going back to the Academy and times of mucking about with the boys, when they were kids and whether or not they set off an arcane explosion in the disciplinarian’s office held little consequence beyond a week’s worth of detention. Right now isn’t back then; he knows right now has consequences neither one of them is able to grasp yet. And maybe they aren’t kids anymore, but he sure feels like one, tossed about in something he doesn’t understand, wishing he could ask his father for advice on life and love, wishing he could ask his mother for advice on life, lore, and death. 

Anyway. He strips clean of his Mage’s robes. The wind whips right through his thin undershirt, chilling him down to the bone, but they have no other choice. It takes him longer than he thought it would to dig a hole deep enough to feel confident that no unwitting passerby could find this mantle on their morning hike. Not quite six feet under, but James does feel like he’s killing some part of himself when he kicks more mud onto the maroon robes. No one is witness to this funeral. No one is witness to the loss of his identity he never wanted in the first place.

Walks back to the fire. She’s still sleeping, innocent looking. James picks up small piles of her plate armor he'd learned to remove as quietly as possible in multiple trips, careful not to clang the metal together on each hike. Bit by bit, piece by piece, he throws her armor into the running river nearby, each splash disguised as water lapping the shore. They can’t sell it or melt it down, not with it cursed and not with his insignia all over the rest of it. She can’t travel in it, not without attracting attention to her, to him. He’s thrown away the only image of her he knows these days and prays, _prays_ it’s worth it. 

When he comes back, boots black with mud, colder than he has been in a long time, Lily is shivering. Her forehead is warm, her skin sweating. It’s not the cold for her; it’s fever setting in. 

James sighs, runs his hand through his hair. Swallows his pride. Braces for additional hurt, rejection, kneeling down next to her in the dirt. 

“Evans,” he whispers, prodding her gently awake. “Lily. It’s too cold for you. We need to get you warmer.”

Her eyes, slightly glazed, blink at him in confusion. “James?”

“It’s me,” he nods. “Come on. You’re not going to get cursed just to die of exposure.”

Lily looks at him. Shakes her head in agreement, drags herself a little closer to the fire. James curls up behind her, knees behind knees, arm over her chest, careful to tuck it under her shoddily bandaged shoulder so as not to disturb it. Her chest rises and falls. Her fevered body keeps him warm and he can only send a faithless prayer to Godric himself that he does the same for her. He doesn’t mind the wind at his back. He doesn’t mind a lot of things, least of all the way her head fits in the crook of his elbow, the way he thinks this is the easiest and only way they’ll be together, the way they aren’t together at all. He’s still angry, he’s still confused, he’s still hurt, and all he can think about before drifting to sleep is that she still feels right. 

In this world which has been made so wrong, she still feels right. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \---
> 
> guess who popped in to retcon a detail here, its me, who also doesn't know what this means. (01.11.21.). but anyway, i gave lily white hair because all i can do is write with only big aesthetic overtures. enjoy the skeletal horror lily here. 
> 
> and cause im here im gonna say. cowboy like me? thats these two.
> 
> \---  
> as of this chapter, this story is on hiatus. perhaps indefinitely, but i dont know. i genuinely hope you've enjoyed it in the way i've taken some joys in the changes ive made and expansions ive done to my comfort zone and to how direct i usually tell a story. 
> 
> i cannot emphasize the importance of community and caring for one another more right now-- not just in a love your neighbor sense but in loving your neighbor enough to challenge and correct them. if you are american like me, well. here's to seeing ya after the election. 
> 
> i think a lot about time and memory and nostalgia and identity and who we are at the end of the day and i think in quarantine i needed this piece to think about it. there are friends im depserate to see again, who they are now and who they were. there are friends i'd like to see again, but not in the way they are now. there are things i should have said a decade ago that arent relevant anymore even if theyre still true. time is precious. and time is the weirdest thing about right now to me. 
> 
> im plugging gendered intelligence once more but also house of tulip once more because it's important to me. 
> 
> http://genderedintelligence.co.uk/
> 
> https://houseoftulip.org/
> 
> \---  
> a few days ago i was mulling over in my mind what initially had me writing this (besides lily with a sword) so if you're looking for comfort media or new fantasy its this: its the lord of the rings but specifically sam carrying frodo through mordor and its the first six star wars movies (they're fantasy they aren't sci-fi and disney i will FIND you) and its also the inordinate amount of dnd real play podcasts i've listened to (the adventure zone: balance but more so it's the band of boobs on not another d&d podcast). and HOW could i forget the legend of zelda!
> 
> love you all.


	9. Just to Be Alone with You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> last we left, the Hollows got attacked after their protection ward sigils were damaged by an eater whose magic felt familiar to james, the lich was there, lily did something and now she and james are stranded in the middle of nowhere without his wand after he used his phoenix tear to stop her from dying. he buried his Mage's robe and her armor and thats what we call an act one closer, baby. 
> 
> as the main note for those who already read ch 8, i retconned a minor detail: i went back and gave lily stark white hair after getting hit with the curse that almost Turned her. i'll have more personal stuff + mutual aid oppurtunities at the end of chapter note.

Here’s the thing. It is actually shamefully easy to do what has to be done. 

It makes so much sense to him, each step of this plan, that he wonders how there was ever a time in his life where he believed he was above his old ways, because this— the vine in his hand, the sneaking around, the perfectly disguised trap— this feels so easy and familiar (and Godric, _good_ ) that in this moment he’s forgotten there could be a decade separating his last true shenanigans and now. _This—_ the perfectly timed pull on the disguised vine that has the unsuspecting carriage loose its wheel, the same pull that has its lone driver climb off his seat scratch his head at the front of the wagon while James climbs in its cargohold— feels good and familiar. A classic heist on a supply cupboard, plain and simple.

Unfortunately, it’s neither plain nor simple. Not without his wand and certainly not without his boys. Peter isn’t here to stand watch and Remus didn’t run logistics on his timings and Sirius isn’t around to blow something up as a fail safe, so James finds himself running full speed with who knows _what_ in his arms while the carriage driver slings arrows at him through the thin trees lining t-he edge of the marsh.

Even so! Leaning against a thick tree with his head tipped back, panting, James can’t help but find reason to smile for the first time in hours. A heist! A poorly executed one, yes, but a heist nonetheless! 

James closes his eyes, laughs some more, takes in deep lungfuls of cool, damp air. It’s cleared his head, this heist of his, enough to feel able to return to camp. It’s cleared his head enough for him to see quite well the straight line of his descent from Mage to thief, in what has turned out to be one of the most confusing twenty-four hours of his life.

***

She hasn’t moved. That is, he hasn’t moved her, and she has neither the strength nor consciousness required to move herself. 

The sun is settled high in the sky by the time he rejoins her there at their measly camp. If he looks closely at the ground, he can see sprigs of green that don’t belong to this swampy setting. Amongst the tangled roots of the ancient oaks and their grand branches, sparse with leaves blowing in the bitter wind, grow fresh spring sprigs of flowers; they are too new, too strange, too bright. Pink, like the petals that followed them here. (As to the matter of “here,” James still hasn’t gotten his bearings on. All this talent for memorizing maps has failed him here). The sprigs grow in a circle around them. If he didn’t know better, if he didn’t know it were impossible, he would have said that they feel almost like a ward, but they can’t be. They’re just remnants of whatever she did yesterday, strange, unnatural leftovers of her strange, natural magic. 

Lily stirs, barely, upon his return. She is Lily, the woman lying there, white haired except for that one streak at her front. She is Lily, the woman lying there, skin pulled and paled and dead to the world in more ways than one. She gives nothing more than a sigh, haggard, which he finds himself matching as he stirs the fire, recounting their inventory once more in his mind:

His moleskin purse with a few copper coins and fewer gold and silver. His leather belt and its solid gold buckle, still on his waist. His dagger, still at his hip, and his hip flask, the latter of which is now refilled with clean water. James throws aside the stick he used to stir the fire before settling himself down next to Lily, whispering, shaking her shoulder in the gentlest of prods to wake her.

It is far too great an effort for her to open the eye that looks back at him in confusion, heavy and bleary.

“Mm?”

“Water, Lily,” James whispers, like if he spoke normally it’d be too loud. Like he’d break her even more than she is, too open like that wound at her back. “Drink.”

She mumbles something else in response that must have been understanding because she lets him prop her head up on his knee, lets him tilt back her chin and hold his flask to his lips for her to drink slowly. Her eyes are closed except for the frequent light fluttering, her fingers grasp loosely around his wrist until she nods, coughs, and opens that same eye again. 

“Tastes like shit.”

“I thought you didn’t mind that.”

“I don’t,” she croaks, already curled back in on herself, another whisper, another small, fragile thing in this strange environment. “Just wanted to let you know.”

“Thanks,” he snorts, but she doesn’t respond. He didn’t expect her to. 

Inventory. What’s Lily got? A few things: Secrets. A fever. A gaping wound down her back that even a phoenix tear wouldn’t close and nothing else but her commoner’s pants and torn, bloodied and blackened linen shirt. _White hair._ Lily Evans, auburn no more. What’s Lily got that they can use together right now? Nothing. He dumped her armor. He doesn’t think her sword ever made it here ( _where_ is _here?)_. That loss is true for the both of them. 

Inventory. Here’s what they have after his thievery: one threadbare traveller’s cloak, a wool nightdress, three holey socks from three different pairs, and the thick blanket they were clumped on top of in the passenger’s cab. Laundry.

But, oh-- a bonus! He nearly forgot the arrowheads! He’ll retrace his steps and retrieve them from trees and the ground to serve as blunt spearheads for fishing or hunting, whichever he can manage. The cramp in his stomach lets him know he needs to manage something soon. 

May as well start now. It can’t be that hard.

***

Well.

All in all, well. 

Okay. Alright. All in all, he supposes it could have been worse. All things considered. 

But all things considered, James Potter is immensely grateful no one was around to witness the most pathetic hunting trip of his life— of potentially, ever. He suspects the rabbit now snagged at the end of his make-shift spear is either exceedingly stupid or exceedingly old. An optimist could call the rabbit exceedingly empathetic to his cause, an ally who took pity on him and decided to stick itself to the blunt arrow tip to provide a pathetic meal for him to bring back to camp. 

He once considered himself that optimist.

It’s been a long time since he’s had to skin his own rabbit; it’s been about the same length of time he’s been convincing himself that his privilege as Mage is negated by his lifestyle as Mage— the lifestyle that kept him on the road, the lifestyle that meant he always had hunters, cooks, regiments, to do his work for him. What a disservice to himself. What a disservice to the realm. 

It’s been a long time since Ogg taught him how to skin an animal cleanly and a while since he’s had to gut anything himself. The resulting meat wouldn’t have been half a meal to him at one point in his life, but in tonight’s frigid winds, he finds it enough.

Whether or not he gave Lily the larger share is irrelevant. How long it took him to coax her into eating each belabored bite is certainly irrelevant for her— for their— chances of survival here. 

His own exhaustion comes far after the cold settles in, long after she’d found herself back into the same unconscious state that’s sustained her all day. The wind wears down more than his new threadbare traveler's cloak and the one sock he kept for himself for his hands can withstand. The wind bares down on his pride, chips it away again, until he can finally do what must be done.

And it starts, as all day has, with a whisper. 

“Lily,” James shakes her shoulder— now donned in the wool nightdress he’d helped her into, now covered in the blanket— “It’s me.”

Her eyes roll a little bit before opening. He hasn’t had to spend much time looking at her face and the strange new thing it is to him. The shame that boils in his stomach by this fact of his weakness nearly makes him sick. He swallows down the shame, so it can digest with the rest of the anger and bitterness sitting in him now.

Anyway. That eye, still familiar in its unfamiliar setting, takes him in. 

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing,” he whispers back. “Just the cold.”

“S’lright,” she closes her eye and shifts under her blanket. James takes his permission and tucks himself against her. She’s warm, too warm, fever sweating, same as the night before, but he’s careful not to disturb her wound, sick to his stomach with confusion that tastes like dread. 

_________________

“Lily, come on. Wake up. This is important.”

“S’not.”

“It is. Yarrow, goldenrod, viperwood, and what?”

She turns her head away from him, like that would ever be enough to scare him off. Can’t do much else-- he’s supporting her neck, trying to get her to focus. 

He shakes her shoulder again, down on his knees for her. “What else?”

“I don’t _know.”_

“ _Think!_ I know it’s in your head somewhere _._ Godric, come on.”

“Mm,” she grumbles, an angry, unsteady breath in through her nostrils. He knows a swear when he hears one, especially from her. 

He knows her well. (He doesn’t at all). 

James doesn’t bother stifling his agitation. He’s been in a full panic since he came back from his morning thievery, ready to celebrate the dried meat and cheese he’d scored, only to catch sight of black ooze seeping from her back in the peaceful morning light. It is black ooze that should have stopped with the tear; necrotic rot, taking hold. 

“Your back, Lily. It’s infected. You’ve been running a fever for two days and I thought it was just shock but— Godric, forget it. Think. What would Remus substitute veravita for?”

She snorts. Smartass can’t keep her eyes open to look at him but can find it in herself to mock him, even her tone shifts towards sardonic when she mutters, “A cleric.”

“We don’t need a cleric,” James grits his teeth together, biting his tongue. She’s only half right. 

Neither one of them speaks for a while. James is trying to reason with himself that veravita could be found in such a damp climate, despite what he knows to be true. It’s been so long that he assumes she fell asleep again until she speaks, her voice surprisingly clear. 

“Try stella root.”

“Oh. Hm. That might work.”

“We’re in the south, right?”

He looks down at her in surprise, blinking. “I don’t know. Are we? I wondered if this was part of the eastern line of forests…”

Lily opens her eyes again, squinting against the sunlight. Her head is still cradled against his knee. “I don’t think so.”

“If you say so.”

“Stella root,” she coughs.. Waits a little more to stop coughing. “It’s a moss.”

James looks up above them, at the ancient oak’s expansive branches and the long, gray tendrils of moss hanging from its arms. “A hanging moss?”

“Don’t call you Mage for nothing, do they?”

He ignores that. James sets down her share of the meat and cheese he’d stolen, as well as the water flask. 

“Eat. Drink. I’ll be back soon.”

“You need a cleric,” she croaks as he walks away, her words echoing behind her. 

James shakes them off. They don’t need a cleric. They need more than a cleric; they need a bleeding fucking miracle. 

They. She. They. There isn't really survival without her. 

***

Lily doesn’t look like Lily. 

Beyond her mangled back. Beyond the fever sweats, beyond the matted knot in her strange white hair developing from her days sleeping on the earth. 

To put it simply. To put it kindly. Lily looks like death. 

The sun is dipped low into the afternoon by the time he makes it back to her and the fire; he wonders if she even noticed the time pass. His fresh caught rabbits, the final find of his search, will have to wait; James sets to work on the poultice, checking first to confirm that she’s still out of it. Her eyes, sunken, remain closed. 

Her state is objectively bad for them (her, just her, if he desired it), but the privacy is appreciated as he begins his inventory: Yarrow, for inflammation. Goldenrod, for fever. Viperwood, antidote. Stella root, inflammation. Together they become something more. 

And yet it is missing something. The inventory comes short. 

She’s right. She’s right and she’s wrong, but she’s right that his salve is missing something without the cleric’s touch. His wand arm itches, his skin at his finger tips feels as if it is made of fire. He pushes down the urge to carve his arm off his body, tendril by tendril, like he wants to; it seems the only way he’d ever get past this sensation of his arcane instincts— _need_ — pulsing through him. His salve is missing magic, so he finds the same sprigs of green growing from the earth around her, finds some of her pink petals, and toss them into his mix, adding more water. 

The salve feels better. It still doesn’t feel like enough.

James looks up from his salve, crushed pathetically over dried leaves with a rock he found, and stares at the unnaturally pale foot soldier here with him in this godforsaken grove. Her fingers, even from this distance, look like bone. Her cheeks poke out, sharp, before hollowing out, tracing the lines of her skull.

Lily looks like death. Lily needs more than these herbs, she needs more than magic he could wield even if he had his wand. 

She needs a cleric, but he doesn’t. He just needs to swallow more of his pride. Or fear. Interchangeable, really. 

He turns towards the fire, steadying himself, eyed burrowing deep into the hottest parts of the flame, lost in trance. Lily doesn’t need a cleric. Lily needs him, and it isn’t arrogant to say so. It’s factual. 

The salve is ready in little less than an hour, start to finish. It takes effort to rouse Lily from her own sort of trance. 

“Hi, it’s me,” he whispers, fingers dipped in salve, touching her face. When she opens her eyes, both of them, he continues, saying, “I don’t know if this will sting. I’m sorry if it does.”

Lily just nods. James steels himself before pulling back her blanket, before shaking her out of the stolen cloak, before he takes another breath and starts to rub the salve into her back, black ooze and open sore and everything.

He hears Lily hiss, her face nearly turned into the ground. It must sting, it must burn, because her skin almost feels like it’s smoking as he runs his fingers along her wound. But she doesn’t complain. Instead, she asks through gritted teeth, “Found your cleric, then?”

“I don’t need a cleric,” James dismisses after a beat, stretching the salve to cover the worst of the wound. “We just have Remus and ourselves to thank.”

She’s quiet for a while longer; he thought she’d passed out again, but he was wrong. “I’ll tell him thank you the next time we see one another.”

He’s quiet for a long while as well. He sees it in his memory, fresh like it is— the Hollows, hollowed out forcefully, violently. Hollowed out of life, stuffed with corpses. 

Eventually, he musters a mutter. “I hope it will be in this life.”

“It will be,” Lily whispers back. Godric help him, he wants nothing more than to believe her, even after all this time. “I know it.”

_________________

Something happens on the third day. She sits up on her own. 

On the fourth day, she wakes up before him and rekindles the fire before curling up again with him under the blanket. Her body is no longer ice aflame. 

On the fifth morning, he shows her where the stream is; she lets him help her brush her hair out, though James notes that Lily doesn’t comment on its color. She just stares at the hair draped over her shoulder with a sort of stiff-lipped resolve. On the fifth evening, she eats her entire share of their fire-roasted duck. 

By nightfall on the sixth night, this new routine of theirs feels... routine. 

The salve works. Beyond all odds, he’s managed a salve of common, uncommon, and begrudgingly conferred ingredients which came together to do what must everyday for this week now. Though he knows it is a fool’s task to hope, James agrees with Lily. He owed Remus many thanks for his simple remedy. Remus doesn’t need to know about the modifications. 

That evening, sitting with her back towards him, staring out at the forest, Lily hums softly as her rubs the salve in. Her back no longer oozes, though the wound still appears to be quite angry. He knows the hums cover pain; he doesn’t call her on it. She’s rubbing salve into her hands, under her cheeks, as if it were lotion or expensive perfume. This is routine is ritual. 

A question. This is their ritual as well. He isn’t sure how old this ritual is, but it feels familiar and ancient and heavy in that way that old things do. Sitting behind a stranger of a past he used to know, embarking on this part of their ritual always feels ominous, dangerous. 

“What did you manage today?”

“Boring stuff,” he says, grateful for the chance to be boring. “I saw a merchant cart, but it was too well manned.” He extends out his leg. “I got new boots. These seem better for trekking. Mine were too nice,” he adds at the end, staring at the worn boot on his foot. They’re slightly big, but comfortable, and worth less than the silver James left in their absence. 

“Are we trekking?” 

“As soon as you can manage a day’s hike.”

“It’s smart to go. Someone must have seen the fire by now.”

“And we aren’t waiting around to find out.”

Silence follows. That’s about the length of these conversations, the only time words are spoken between them at length. The rest of their routine is unspoken, from James leaving in the morning for various supply gathering and even sheltering for the cold together. 

It would be easy if he had nothing to say to her, but the opposite is true. There is so much more to say than he can find the right words for and he is left instead with a dearth of knowledge housed in the same place that certainty used to live. There is so much to say and nothing to say at all; the contradiction leaves his tongue too heavy with the effort of this untenable balance and it lies still, stuck, stuck like his heart, which used to beat for a castles and kingdoms in his mind built entirely on the want of her. 

That’s why her next question surprises him. She’s found a voice for her own weights in her chest, lifted up into the silence between them. Lifted and spoken, vulnerable and everything. 

“Why haven’t you left me yet?”

James’ hands still at her back, half finished. She speaks again, voice soft, but his hands lie against the skin above her spine. He feels the words echo against her bones, flesh and bone that she is, flesh and bone holding secrets. 

“I wouldn’t blame you, you know. If you left.”

“I would.”

She turns her head a little now, her chin resting on her shoulder, hair falling over her face. Looking at him and not, the same duplicitous duality she’s always relied on. 

“You could stop pretending to be a thief and commandeer one of those carriages instead of robbing it. Tell them who you are and get home.”

“I couldn’t,” James shakes his head, drops his hands onto his lap. They curl to fists. His right arm starts to ache again, fingers burning. 

“You could. What’s stopping you?”

“There’s nothing I can do for the Hollows. Any survivors would have fled by now or have been dead for days.” Now his words burn, his stomach churns a different fire than the loss of his wand but the undoubtable loss of all his friends, exponentially worse, exponentially more unspeakable than the love he has buried. “I can’t do anything for them, not without my—“ _fuck,_ does it hurt, does it all hurt in different ways physical and mental, confusing, ebbing and flowing— “Not now.” He picks up the salve again, forces his fingers to open, dip into the bowl (he’d stolen this beauty on morning four), go back to her back. “You just did a great deal to make sure I survived my last attempted killing. It would be a poor way to repay that debt by dying on the side of the road and leaving you stranded.”

More moments pass in silence than spans out between them. More surprise when she opens her mouth again, this time without a question. A violation of their ritual and unsteady truece. 

“You don’t like me. Not anymore.”

He waits before answering, careful, tiptoeing. Two can deal in half-truths. “I don’t trust you.”

She doesn’t wait. “You used to. Even long ago.”

“I didn’t always. Even long ago.”

A pause. “Because of him?”

“Because of him.”

James has reached the small of her back, the place where spine nearly hits hip bone, and attempts to focus his full attention on using the rest of the salve so they can be free of this. So they can eat, so they can sleep (sleep, knee to knee, chest to chest, together in ways they’ll never be). He’s trying to focus his attention on this, the salve, because James has had unbidden and unwanted memories of _his_ face, angry and sallow and bitter. And then James is helping her pull the wool nightgown back over her body and then he’s looking at her face, better now but still sallow and sunken and hurt, and James sees _him._

Suddenly that weight holding him back is less. The shock of that image, incongruent and terrifying, is enough to shake him of what pride or embarrassment held him back from being able to admit just this simple thing. 

She isn’t him. James knows that. He can have his own suspicions about Lily Evans and her motives and secrets and still know she isn’t and will never be _him._

“You’re right,” James says quietly, once she’s pulled her arms through the nightgown. He’s perched on his knee in front of her, looking at her straight in the eye, sunken and dead but her. “What you said before. I don’t know you and that really doesn’t matter anymore. I’m not who you used to know anyway, either.”

She stares wearily at his extended hand and he doesn’t blame her; it _is_ a silly gesture, but he means it. A blank page. 

He smiles. It’s the first time he has in days, especially around her. It’s old, familiar, maybe not good, but new. “I’m James.”

“Lily,” she introduces herself, deep dark circles under her eyes doing nothing to draw his eyes away from them. There’s also a smile there, small, genuine. “Pleasure.”

________________

He sets down his pack very carefully, all their worldly possessions, all the petals and sprigs he could pluck, all the salve he could make. Behind him, she makes a frustrated noise that he ignores as he moves on to their next task. 

“I can go farther.”

“There’s no need.”

“There isn’t enough distance. We should go more west, where there’s cleaner water—“

James stands straight up, his tinder pile forgotten. Lily’s looking west, like she wants to go, like she knows where to go. 

“—it’s just murk here, we’ll die of dysentery, don’t know how you managed to find something good—“

“How do you know?”

“That dysentery kills?” She pits him with a look, very familiar. Her eyebrow’s raised up. 

He’d roll his eyes (also very familiar) if this weren’t so important. “No. About cleaner water west of here.”

“Oh.” She blinks. “Because we’re near the edge of the Knees. The roots of the cypress, they look like knees, see?”

“Which means you know where these knees are going to take us.”

Lily nods, suddenly very still, her flint and his dagger frozen in her hands where they were once readying to start a fire. 

James runs a hand through his hair, checking his anxiety as much as it could be checked. He feels a twig in there. “Anytime now, Lily. Really.” 

“All water is connected here, actually,” Lily says, setting down the dagger. At least she’s looking at him now. “The good, clean water and the undrinkable. So that all life and survival could spring from the same source with the same wisdom, the good and the bad, with the smartest to determine between the two.”

“No.”

“Yes,” she nods, looking particularly pale, looking particularly distressed. “You’re familiar with the legend of Serpent’s Pass, right?”

James shuts his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. The twigs in his hair don’t bother him. “You didn’t.”

“I don’t know why I did!”

“Of _all_ the places, Lily, _Godric—_ “

“It was— I don’t know, James, it’s not like I was _thinking—“_

“But _Slytherin_ , Lily?” His voice is too loud, shamefully so, losing his cool. Lily doesn’t even flinch, just puts her face in her hands, and that makes him feel worse. First that he’s lost a temper he never likes taking out on anyone and second, that she still can’t even fight back. For a moment he’d forgotten that she isn’t who she was; that they’d hiked half the day and she never complained, even though there is a line of sweat at her hairline, even though the dark crevice lines of her face stand out deep, sad purple against her skin. A shell. A skull. 

James drops his hand to his side. His voice is quieter, softer. “How?”

“I don’t know,” she repeats, miserable. “We were surrounded by necromancers. It must have just been on my mind.”

 _His_ teleports require knowledge of a place, not just the thought of a place. Neither of them knows how her magic worked— works? She hasn’t done anything since they’ve been here, right?— so he drops the retort on his lips, drops the tinder on the pile, drops his hopes of survival lower.

Later, when he’s rubbing salve on her back, more lies leave his lips, dripping thick as the lie here at his fingers, this concoction of herbs and divine intervention. He worries over the words, afraid of them, like he fears most things now.

“Where we are doesn’t change anything. We’d still be lying low until you can enter town and we’d still be weary of strangers. This doesn’t change anything.”

Lily shrugs. He watches the muscles carved there tug at taught skin, but the skin at the top of the wound is starting to heal, to crack and fold over itself. The scab before the scar. “If it were any other place you could find an ally to trust.”

“I have allies in Slytherin.” A lie or a truth, he doesn’t know. Lily just scoffs.

“Slughorn doesn’t count. He’s one kiss-ass in a population of pride too easily manipulated. Please don’t humor me by pretending we aren’t fucked in new and different ways than before.”

So James obliges. He won’t pretend. He will give her this different thing, though, after many long minutes of quiet— a truth. “I’m sorry,” he says gently, thumbs in the grooves of her rib cage, digging delicately at the rot. This is hard to say, like anything that ever threatened his pride as much as this. “I’m sorry. For being… I’m angry, I know, and even I can’t stand it. I’ve never been good at being in debt to others.”

“We can’t speak of any debt but the one I find myself in now,” Lily shakes her head, turns out a little to watch him, to relearn the ways in which he thinks with his brow, his downturned lips.

James shakes his head, hands on her skin. He does so little thinking and so much thinking when he has to be like this with her, too close. “No. You have no debt. Not for saving me.”

Lily lets a minute pass, silent, before quietly asking, “What of this debt, then?” She turns her head slightly, chin to shoulder, hair draped, half hidden, half seen. “That this salve can work.”

James doesn’t answer her. It is easier to lie in silence and omission than out loud to her, even half hidden and half seen. But maybe she is the person he knew, because then she turns her head back forward and says, far too casually, “You must have found your cleric.”

So another lie. James waits until he’s out of salve and can wipe the rest off on his trousers, standing. “No cleric,” he dismisses, not looking at her. “Just pure dumb luck.”

________________

Somewhere, some place just next to that place where stubbornness and pride lie as bedmates in his psyche, sits curiosity— ravenous yet still, miraculously, patient. He’s always struggled in keeping himself satiated, and nothing has ever fed it like she has, time and time and time again.

His curiosity itself has never been one; it was no mystery he would come into life intensely interested in the state of things. His mother claimed he got it from his father, who claimed the opposite. But this is what they did, blame the other for traits clearly evident within themselves. 

Anyway.

This is here in the present, sometime after their next hiking day, sometime in between coaxing the fire to stay lit, sometime between coaxing roots out from the earth and coaxing a reluctant prayer out his lips. This is here, somewhere between coating her back with this salve, where the question they’d both been waiting to appear between them arrives, innocent, wise. This is here, somewhere in that space between him and her, somewhere where he can leave his words. The words are spoken to her scabbing wound, whispered quietly to that morning dew which ices to frost in the damp, swampy winter that has been slowly settling into the earth over these past weeks. 

This is their routine, settled into the earth, settled into his bones, over these past weeks. He hunts and she joins; she prepares the meat while he prepares his salve, two tasks completed separately so they can come back together again like they used to. 

James still finds his words heavy and difficult to carry. He finds that this burden does not make the words easier to bear, nor easier to bury. He finds the burden just means the words are important: that they matter, that right here, right now, matters. His fingers trace familiar patterns of this strange mix of active rot and scar tissue on her back, this strange mix of begrudged prayer and illicit magic from the dried petals shed from her magic. Lily, for her part, stays quiet, waits for him to help her pull her shirt over her head again, quiet yet burning, like always. 

Quiet yet burning. Quiet yet burning, as ever, as always. James kneels down before her now, with the sun rising higher in the sky, and she looks at him now, ever quiet and ever burning, ever piercing into his eyes. Waiting. He speaks.

“You can do magic without your wand and without decaying anything around you,” James starts, putting her wrong hair back into its rightful place off her shoulder, something tangible, something so she doesn’t have to see how small he feels right now, forcibly making his voice bigger and bolder than he is now. “You did magic that should have been impossible. You did that, nearly all on your own.”

Lily just. Lily nods. She nods and his hands are still there at her shoulders where her shirt drapes down, and she brings one hand to meet his wrist, fingers clasped. He is captive there, just as she is— in position, in attention, equals. Equals, maybe, for the first time in a long time. Equally caught. Equally dependent. Equally lost. 

James takes the next step forward, metaphorically speaking; he doesn’t know if she steps back or not. She is hard to read and he was a fool for thinking he ever knew the rhythm of her movement. It seems their dance is suspended— for just the breath of a moment— when he asks, simple: “Will you teach me?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> those of you who may follow me on tumblr saw that im no longer posting jily there, which i think is the right decision for me. here, content is more searchable and controllable, so i won't be contributing to new hp content that might show up on people's dash untagged for those who do want a complete cut-off. im still available by dm there if you have any need/questions/concerns. 
> 
> been doing a lot of thoughts about how we have to heal where we got hurt. and this story wasn't finished. i dont have a timeline for it, i dont know if it will be finished, im just going to keep vibing. thanks to all who did comment on the last chapter reaching out. 
> 
> anyway, i wanna thank zazi, whose conversations about the state of affairs in ethical relating to this fandom have been fruitful, meaningful, productive, and heartening. he's got a modern au WIP that seems compelling if you're looking for another au read! https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zazi/pseuds/Zazi
> 
> anyway! the most important note is this relatively new (as of jan 12 2021) thread of links to support Black trans women through various aid. supporting this is way more important than a comment if you've only got time for one: https://twitter.com/hardc0resouma/status/1347657296751460352?s=27 
> 
> love y'all, stay safe!


	10. Scrying to Meet You

“You aren’t doing it right,” Lily starts, almost inpatient, angry, in a way he feels like she shouldn’t be. “ _Try_.”

“I _am.”_

“Stop thinking with just your head, then. _Feel_.”

“I _feel_ pretty pissed off, now that you mention it—“

“Use it, then,” she snaps, her eyes moving from the flower in her hand to his, narrowed, bright. She looks more like herself, not just because of the familiar expression. 

Instead of anything magical, James just breaks the stick in his hand in two and throws it, far as he can. 

“This isn’t working.”

“You expect to have mastered it on your first try?”

 _Yes._ “No,” he grumbles, kicking a log. Behind him, Lily heaves a sigh, less frustrated than he thought it would sound, more tired than he would have liked it to have sounded. They hiked away from their camp to do this, just to put some distance between this and their safety. His dagger is ready at his hip, her makeshift spear sits at her side, but all these precautions seem for naught as he hasn’t been able to cast shit the whole morning. 

The afternoon soon is high over her head. She, noticeably, _has_ been able to cast. Small, yes, but— and there isn’t any other word for it— _remarkable._ He hasn’t seen her do magic in over a decade and this small, small thing of her touch is huge. Lily sighs again, holding out her palm to him, beckoning him closer. 

She looks more like herself, more than ever, in this moment. He isn’t sure why; he’s just sure she looks less like Death. Her cheeks are fuller, beneath her eyes less purple, her hands inviting.

Inside her palm is a flower, opening and closing, a moon waxing and waning, a tide ebbing and flowing. 

“Stop _thinking_ so hard,” she reprimands, gently, gently, gently, talking to that flower in her palm and not at him, not directly. “We studied and we experimented and we learned spell book after spell book through nothing more than intellect, but this isn’t arcana. Not really.” Her eyes flick up to his, feeling his gaze. “Stop looking at me,” she chides, her lips turning up in a delicate smile. “Pay attention.”

“I am.” Something about the way he said it makes her scoff, kicks his foot with hers. 

_Feel._ Of course he looks at her instead of the flower. He’s never felt anything more than when he looks at her now, every emotion possible on the human spectrum there in his body, roiling and boiling within, when he looks at her. Angry, ambivalent, enamored. Indignant. Infatuated. Offended. Obsessed. Disgusted, devoted. Each swing of the pendulum still digs into him to find a word, thought, _feeling_ about his relation to Lily Evans, then and now, now and then.

“Do you remember the early days? I mean before the Academy. When you were a kid.”

“Yes, I—“

“No, shush, don’t think. Listen. Feel.”

James closes his eyes. Seems easier that way. He takes a few steady breaths, calling upon the one skill of his bound solely in feeling rather than thinking— the clerical, the holy, the healing. This part of him has always been there, sitting in that place hope and despair stay together as constant companions. He’d buried this part of him to be Mage, great thinker of thoughts, great tinkerer to those thinks, student of none but arcane secrets. He sees them, these parts of him, rise in the mist of his mind. Him in his Mage’s robes, his old uniform, in monk’s garb, in commoner’s clothes, a foot soldier, a merchant, a bridegroom. 

In another breath, his mind is clear of the fractured, terrifying, mosaic images of himself. They fall away into this mist, and he’s left seeing only himself, now, sitting in a marshy clearing. Lily must sense some change; she continues, anyway. 

“You’re a kid. Your mother is the Mage of Many Words and your father is the best alchemist the East of Academy has seen in decades.”

Images float, unbidden, back into his mind’s eye. Only this time they are not fractured, broken, terrifying caricatures. This time he sees himself, not of Academy age, but younger. Barely more than a toddler, fingers in his mouth, no glasses. She continues her weaving.

“Magic to you isn’t far off wizards in bigger cities or expensive potions for your sick neighbor. It’s accessible. It’s everywhere. It’s _you.”_

It is. When he fell through a bramble patch running with their dog, he didn’t get hurt. When he knocked over his father’s latest experiment, it stopped mid-air, not spilling a single drop to the ground. Before he could talk, his mother knew what he was saying when he spoke to her in his mind. Food he didn’t like turned into food he did, cold water turned hot when desired. 

“Eventually you lost that— you can’t do the things that once came easily, changing the state of things that should resist your efforts. You can do nothing more than a few trick cantrips, but that doesn’t matter. You know you’re off to the Academy soon, you’ll have your wand soon, you’ll be magic again.”

At the mention of a wand, his bone tingles. The pain distracts from the scenes playing in his mind at her words, but at his next breath, all he sees is him as a knobbly-knee kid, running around with a small Sirius, their first day at school. 

“This is a _lie.”_

The flashback images vanish. He’s left alone in his mind, seeing himself sitting by himself, cross-legged. It isn’t him now, but this _was_ him. The image clears, fog moving away from the fence posts propping him up. The dead unicorns, from months ago. The prayer for healing he’s sent up for their peace, the ritual he’d cast without aid of his wand, just the aid of his prayer said to no one but their memory. And then, sitting next to him, looking up at him, his toddler self, giggling and bubbly.

“How can magic be lost? How could we forget the root essence of all being, the root essence of ourselves? No,” Lily continues, her voice an enchantment— literally. He can feel her magic in the space between them, he can feel the traces of her magic move his memories, gently guiding spindles helping him understand. “This is a lie. Maybe that’s harsh— a lie implies intention, manipulation, but maybe that’s what has happened to us as a people over the centuries. Maybe instead it is a falsehood, an error, an innocent misunderstanding of the natural way of things. After all, isn’t magic the process of altering the state of things? Should magic not alter us? But that’s another thing entirely. Pay attention, now. This is the point.”

Something happens in his mind, in the air around them, in his ears, to his skin. Different notes of music, single beats of a broader melody, play in the space between them. The cacophony builds, discordant, confused. The music is her question, circular, suspicious, _hopeful._ And then suddenly the tandem images of himself in his mind are cleared as well— arcane, divine, and something else in between— until there is nothing in his head, nothing but the absolute, irrevocable understanding of the here-and-now as the music surges, as he becomes aware of each blade of grass pushing up against his legs as he sits, his sensations of touch and hearing and smelling and tasting and seeing coming together in this crescendo of…— Godric, what other word is there?— _existence_. Meaning. That great thing known as the human condition.

“This is the well, James.” Her spindles of magic weaving in the air pull taught; a chord is struck, a melody in the air. Not cacophony— _music._ Existence isn’t entropy; it’s a symphony. “ _This_ is the place from which magic flows, not your wand _._ Your wand is the instrument, not the conduit. _You_ are.”

There is nothing magic in the air anymore, nothing more tense than the natural rhythm of _them._ She’s released her hold on him, on nature, on reality. James remains silent for more than a moment. When he next speaks, he has to wipe tears from his eyes before he can look at her. 

“How did you do this?” He asks, his hands shaking a little bit. He hopes she doesn’t notice, especially given that she doesn’t seem to be affected like his. She isn’t shaky; she looks fantastical. She doesn’t look like death, not in this moment with her white hair shimmering, with her pale skin more ivory than the bruise it has been. There’s sweat from effort on her brow, but she’s _glowing_. Of course. Magic has always suited Lily Evans. But it used to suit him, too. He shakes his head in disbelief, instead of his hands. “How did you and Sirius even do this?”

“It really wasn’t hard to relearn, to be honest,” Lily confesses, her gaze skirting around his. He isn’t sure why, be it timidity or the trepidation despite what she’s done, her further detailing her treason to a Mage. But still, she continues, her voice a steady thing, “Magic. Once we saw what Crouch was capable of, once we knew it was possible. It was like… it was like a lamp had been lit in a dark room in a part of a house I’d abandoned, you know?” The flower in her hand opens, closes. He can _smell_ it, honeysuckle sweet, alluring and acrid. “I knew in that one moment that the world could make sense again if I could just puzzle out this _one_ thing, this simple, simple task of remembering magic. And you know Sirius,” then she rolls her eyes, undeniably and relentlessly fond, “Stubborn as an old dog, and just as good as sniffing out trouble. Obviously he insisted on doing the same.”

James snorts. She’s right. _Godric,_ he misses Sirius. He misses him right now more than he ever did in those ten years apart. 

“Stay with that,” she Lily instructs, suddenly coming closer to him, holding out her flower like it’s a flame in her hands, cupping it like it’s life itself. “This magic is different,” she repeats, moving her cupped hands over his; he opens his palms instinctually, ready. “This magic _feels_ different. Stop thinking. Start feeling.” 

When she dips the flower into his palms, he’s surprised to find that it isn’t a flame; it’s cold, delicate, despite the life she’s given it. And for a few glorious moments, the flower stays as she created it, pink and glimmering with golden pollen, pulsing subtly in his hands like a heartbeat. He breathes deep breaths with its beat, staying in rhythm, and the flower _hums—_ or is that Lily, singing?— and it’s like a song he’s heard before, it must be, because it’s like something he remembers. The thoughts come unbidden, of what spell this might be, and how he could record it in a scroll to always know, to remember, remember, remember, and the song ends. The flower’s petals wilt, its beating rhythm silent. 

James, crestfallen, looks up at Lily. The glow is gone; Death once more.

“I’m sorry,” James stutters. It’s his fault. He knows it, he understands it, the flower died in his hands and now she looks like hell again. “I’m sorry, I—“

“There is nothing to apologize for.” That’s what she _says,_ but she’s blinking very rapidly, she won’t look at him.

“I must have done something—“

“Let’s go back to camp.”

“Are you alright, then?” James helps her stand up, pulling her to her feet. He doesn’t want to let go of her hands. It feels important to him that he doesn’t let them go, like the answers can be found if they were to just refuse to let go of one another. 

What a silly notion. He drops her hands. She drops her gaze.

“I’m fine,” Lily answers, eyes red with tears she doesn’t bother to hide. “Just tired.” 

***

He did the hunting and the cooking that evening; she slept, from the moment they returned to their measly camp to the moment he woke her to convince her to at least try the weird swamp hen he’d killed. 

“Will you tell me the truth now?” James asks, fingers dipping into the salve jar, fingers running down her bare, open back. He can tell she is in poor spirits from the slack hunch in her shoulders alone. She even gives a half hearted-shrug, mumbling. 

“It’s nothing.”

“It’s something.”

“It isn’t important. Not really.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She sighs, shaky, when she starts to talk again. “I feel _horrible._ I’m tired and I feel like shit and I was stupid enough to think today that I was getting better.” It takes her a while to get out the whole thing. She’s trying to level her voice so he can’t hear her crying, but it’s a fool’s errand. Her shoulders shake beneath his hands, he can practically feel her radiate defeat, and he hears a desperation in her voice that makes _him_ feel fragile. “Earlier. It was like nothing happened. It was like I was me again. Now I just feel like shit.”

“Lily,” James starts, distressed, “you did magic. That’s more effort than our hikes and you still can’t manage those well, either.”

“I did child’s play.”

“Your child’s play is more than what anyone can do. _I_ can’t.”

The compliment does not soothe her. “That’s the first time I’ve tried anything since… since we got here. I thought if I rested it would be fine and for a little while today I thought— I thought it worked! I didn’t feel god-awful and godforsaken like I do now. It’s not just how I feel and it’s not just my hair and it’s not just my back. Magic _hurt_ me.” He has to strain his ear to hear her clearly, sitting behind her as he is, her voice muffled from holding her head down in the crook of her arms wrapped around her knees. 

“What have I done?” She’s full sobbing now, big heaving sobs that wrack her whole body. “What if I can’t do magic anymore? What if this is _it_ , James? What have I done?” 

“Oh, Lily,” he starts, but where else is there to go? What else is there to say? His voice is pained, too. “Oh, Lily.”

She sobs. She _sobs._ What else is there to do? What else is there to say? He has to finish the salve, so he does, before he helps her pull the shirt back over and gives her the water skein. 

When the wind blows strong, they’re already curled against each other. She isn’t sobbing anymore, just exhausted. There’s a chance that his fingers are toying with the fringes of her white hair and there’s a chance that it makes both of them feel better, even though both of them pretend it isn’t happening. She curls her head tighter in the crook of his arm, he pulls the blanket over her as a woolen shield, and maybe his chin rests atop her head, another barrier. They both pretend it isn’t happening. 

Because they’re both pretending like this isn’t happening, James can’t say what’s on his mind, which is the very curious thing of her hair— that he _swears_ the strands he touches turn red, just like they used to be, fire once more. But that must be the way the orange glow from the campfire reflects in her white, white hair. 

James tucks away this observation in the same store of information he’s currently piecing together, the now crucial question of Lily Evans’ relation to magic— why it both hurt and healed her today, and why it feels like he had a role in that hurt. She told him not to think; but it feels right to think. It feels important to think, at least right now, at least about this, about them, about her. 

After all this time, he still thinks about them, him and her. They’re the only people in the world right now. What else is he supposed to do?

***

James did not sleep much that night and so far has nothing to show for it. He has nothing to show for it except that the tips of her hair are red, even in the morning sun. 

That’s why he’s still lying there, his fingers twirling in her hair, white frost to fire.

Fire. The one thing that keeps coming to mind, from the feeling in his bones to the churning in his stomach to the real embers that need to be stirred again. Fire, the red ends of her hair. 

Fire, that thing in his heart. Fire, the words they once traded, fire like the one he and Sirius set in their dormitory, fire like the thing that burns down forests so that new growth can happen. Fire, the great purger, whose pyres have been used and abused for centuries before him. 

Fire, like the feeling at his fingertips. Fire, like the thing now in his free hand, held aloft while the other still holds her. _Fire_ , warm, dangerous, life giving. 

_Magic_.

_____________

He watches the fire build in his palm, extinguishes it, sets it alight again. He builds another one in his left hand, throws it in the air. He makes another to join its sisters, and throws his laughter there too in his juggling ring. 

“You are insufferable,” James hears behind him in a tone that betrays the hard-earned smile on her lips. He doesn’t need to turn to see the expression and instead, closing his eyes, lets the image take over his mind space of sight and sound. The indulgence is over in the moment it takes him to open his eyes again and, noticing that his fire balls grew in size and vibrancy, James snaps his fingers and makes the fire circle around him like a ring before dissipating the effect. 

“Insufferable,” she shakes her head at him when he turns around, big, brilliant smile on his face. She isn’t smiling, not now that he’s looking at her. Just like years ago. Then, said to the spear she’s sharpening, “Show-off.”

“Me? Never,” he smirks, satisfied and feeling it— feeling satisfied that is, feeling good that is. “This is the appropriate response for a savant at a week’s practice, Evans.”

“Sure it is.” He just grins even wider.

His bones don’t ache. For the first time in weeks, he isn’t itching to leave his skin, he isn’t reaching for the dagger to slice off his arm sinew by sinew. 

The only thing dulling the absolute exhilaration of the moment is that she isn’t casting with him, and that feels wrong. It would be more fun to practice with her, to be challenged by her rather than guided by her. Lily is doing a champion job of hiding her heartbreak, watching him, and he is doing no job of hiding his fun— purposely. For once in his life of dealing with the inner workings of Lily Evans, he has a plan. 

She’s sitting cross legged on the earth, trying to sharpen whatever blades they have, her usual pastime. She misses her sword.

James joins her on the ground. He pokes her knee when she doesn’t look at him immediately.

“Why has no one else done this?”

“Pester me? Plenty _have_ done that, sir, but none quite as good as you.”

“Rediscover magic, Evans.”

“Well I was rather flattered by the thought that none could but me.”

“And while I’ve no doubt of that, _show-off,”_ he teases, “I just mean why has it taken so long to know of its possibility.”

“You won’t like the answer.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Lily holds up her arrowhead to the light, searching it for remaining imperfections. She’s turned a cheap arrowhead into one a Mage’s army would have commissioned. She’s always taken pride in her work. She’s also always made him wait, and now is no different. 

“Ten years is truly not a long time,” she starts rather reasonably, setting down the arrowhead, running a hand through her thin white hair. “Given the circumstances.”

“Hard to be creative with Eaters assailing a different town every week.”

“Yes. It’s also hard to be creative when you know the consequence would be death.” She looks at him dead in the eye, skeletal hands folded still in her lap. “You have no idea what it has been like to live in the towns you only visit, to fear the fields you only traverse with a full regiment. Food supply is cut off or destroyed every other month and aid requests take two months to even process. If the town magistrate doesn’t like you, all he has to do is accuse you of aiding and abetting Eaters. I’ve felt the resentments be tended to like weeds in the outskirts, in the main cities, and in the barracks. But what do the Mages care? There’s always a big raid around the corner to boost morale for the Mages’ long but inevitable win! And of course there’s only a little time left before Dumbledore does something big, wise man that he is, safe and secure in his tower as he is. Surely, surely there is _something_ to be gained, won, sooner or later.”

She shakes her head, right as it seems she has more to say. James opens his mouth to ask for more, to ask for her to explain herself— of _course_ there is more to be gained, more to be won, sooner rather than later; of course there is victory in sacrifice and meaning in war— but she just moves on, her illustration yet incomplete, and he is still captive audience to her words. Another course for another day. 

“The truth is that someone _has_ relearned magic. Voldemort and his Eaters have likely had this tool at their disposal for a long time— perhaps even before the war. We’ll never know.”

“But they aren’t doing what you’re doing,” James furrows his brow, this time able to cut into her words. “Even if that claim is true, and I don’t know that it is. What they do is necromancy, not magic.”

Lily rolls her eyes. “A distinction you make on aesthetics alone. Even if they _are_ drawing on some unknown source of power from the hells, and I honestly don’t think they are, it remains, at its core, an act of changing the state of things. It’s an act of magic.”

“We aren’t talking about substance or form, Lily, we’re talking about life and death.”

“But life and death _are_ acts of magic,” she corrects emphatically, eyes wide, hands moving the way they do when she has an important point to make. “That fire in your hands, is it not life?”

“It’s a reaction,” James shakes his head, still practical, still thinking. The arcane is not the philosophical question she’s positing; it is a study, a process, with a beginning and an end. “It’s the changing of the state of things from the air.”

“I know that.” There’s a soft sort of smile on her lips, almost strange to see in this context. “I know that. I just think it’s also something more. Don’t you?”

James opens the palm of his hand, conjures the flame there. Air to fire. Elements altered, activated. His palm throbs with the heat there, comfortably, and the memory of her flower in his hand, _beating_ like a heart, not like a flower. Something more. 

He closes his fist, puts out the flame. Pockets the question for the file he keeps in his head about her. He doesn’t have an answer, not when he thinks about her magic in his hands. When James looks up, Lily’s staring at the space where the fire left, a look he can’t fully place in her eyes. She sighs then, leaning her head back against the tree behind her. 

“Maybe others have done as we have done.” She sounds tired. “Maybe there is an old woman in a little cottage in the woods, happy and alone. But maybe she’s already been killed for it. Maybe all the others found the consequences to be too severe.” A pause, while the words settle, while a family of herons fly by, while a live frog gives a solitary lament. A pause, while she pulls all of gravity into her words, and without meaning to, shifts the delicate balance of their lonely world. “Look at me, James. Can you tell me that the consequences I faced have not been severe?” Lily laughs scathingly, something that is worse for all her whispers. “Look at me and see your future, perhaps. See who you will be in a few months for this folly of ours.”

Her eyes are still closed. Maybe she’s just tired, maybe she’s trying to avoid whatever conclusion will be drawn on his face from her assertion. 

Because her eyes are closed, she cannot see the sorrow there that lies steady, instead of the pity she expects. Because her eyes are closed, she cannot see him shake his head, unable to follow where she leads. James reaches one hand out, rests it on the ankle of her boot— just enough to get her attention, knowing his voice is quiet, soft, small in all of this. 

“I do not think your consequences have been as severe as you believe.”

Lily opens one skeptical eye at him, still set in its sunken place.

“I do not mean you haven’t suffered,” James tells her, leaning forward, still quiet. The words hang in the air, important. He needs her to hear him now. He doesn’t understand everything, but he’s starting to understand this: that if magic is as she says, then all is not lost. He keeps his voice gentle, laying out his proposition as an offering before her. “I only mean to say that I think you are falling fool to your own fallacy.”

“You don’t say.”

“You said it yourself! They did not discover necromancy without wands, they discovered magic. If magic is life— as _you_ claim— how can it forsake you? How can it abandon you, who did so much to find it again?”

“I also claimed it is death.”

“But _you_ do not deal in death, Lily Evans,” he holds stubbornly, this core belief. “Death has failed to lay its claim on you— and the fact that your magic is difficult now, that it is costly now, does not mean it is worthless to you now. I think it means you have to keep doing it—“

“Stop it.”

Her eyes are narrowed slits. She’s sitting up in her position, no longer leaning on the tree, but alert. Angry. What?

“Stop? Lily, I’m trying to tell you I think you have to use magic again, I think that’s the only way for you to get better, to—“

“Stop it.” Her voice cuts like venom through the air, effectively silencing him. “Stop.”

When he only matches her glare, it seems to embolden her. It livens her up, despite her words, despite the effort, despite the exhaustion. 

“I do not need a mirror to know what I’ve become, James. I can see it in your eyes. The fear. Confusion. Disgust,” she spits, disgusted herself.

“Never,” he sputters, sitting straight as well, “ _Never_ did I mean— _“_

“I know what I’ve become,” she ignores his interruption, powering over him, holding up her hands. “Look at me again and say Death has not laid claim when it so clearly has.” Her skeletal fingers are closed, clenched fists, under her own observation and derision. “Please, forget cruelty. Do not give me hope you cannot guarantee.”

The last words are watery as they leave her mouth. Her throat is thick with emotion she’s trying, again, to hide from him.

“I’m tired,” she claims again, standing up, not looking at him. “Let’s go back to camp.” 

“What?” 

And when she doesn’t answer, James takes in a deep breath. He stands, too. When she struggles with the stolen nightgown being used for a traveling cloak, he helps her pull it over her head, before ceding all the ground he once had.

“Alright, Evans. Back to camp it is.”

***

“I meant what I said earlier,” she confesses quietly, her eyes unfocused, staring out into the fire. “Just so you know.”

James turns to her, startler out of his own revere. They’d spent their walk back in silence; he fished by himself, she scaled and prepped the fat, whiskered things by herself. The sun is sinking across the sky, creating shadowed oak and cypress trees in its wake. He’s staring at her profile, at the icy white, brittle hair tucked behind her ear, at the sharp lines of her face. 

“I’m sorry,” he confesses then, a little break forming in his heart, bud of guilt flowering in his stomach. “For ever giving the impression that you are somehow not yourself, just because you don’t look like it. I promise, it was done unintentionally.”

“What’s said is said,” she waves off, but she still won’t look at him. “It’s so unimportant in the grand scheme, anyway, when I think about… Everything else.” Her hands play with the hem of her shirt in her lap, worried. Then, quietly: “Do you think he made it?”

He knows what she means. He just does. “You’re thinking of Sirius.”

“I am always thinking of Sirius.”

“As am I,” James admits, his own heart sinking to that pit it goes to when thinking about the Hollows. 

“That is what I regret, in all this. That I wasn’t good enough to grab him as well. It feels a grand betrayal.”

He can’t answer her immediately, his throat thick with emotion, with the words and thoughts sitting frozen in fear in his head coming out into the air between them through her words. James squeezes her shoulder, forgetting himself— that this is not part of the routine, this is touch for the purpose of comfort, at a moment where they both know it. And his hand is still there on her shoulder, his thumb is still unnecessarily grazing her skin. She repeats her question, and her voice betrays her tears. 

“Do you think he made it?”

This time, he can speak his answer. It’s a short one, but a sure one. “Yes.”

Lily looks at him from over her shoulder, glum. “What makes you so sure?”

“Because we’re both still here. Something feels wrong about that if he isn’t alive.” James says simply, certainty replacing his fears, for her sake, for his sake. 

“What if I blew his cover? What if the others discover what he can do? What if he looks like me now?”

“Then he would consider it a small price to pay,” James says sternly, winning a look from her. She looks miserable still, her white hair a halo in the glow of the sunset. “You and I both know him, Evans. He may balk at the notion in jest, but that man would do anything for you, no matter how debasing, if you truly needed him to do so.”

“He’d hate me for it.”

“He would never. Besides,” he shakes his head, turning more towards her. “I learned long ago never to bet against Sirius’ chances of survival. He’s done it before. He’ll do it again. He’ll do whatever it takes to make it.”

Lily nods, her eyes still watery, before she just places her face in her hands, clearly exhausted. 

Something else in his heart breaks a little then, too. “It’s alright if you _do_ care about your looks, you know.” He makes his tone a little lighter, longing for the days when every single word exchanged between them weren’t these heavy, weighty things. He wants to do this simple thing, offer comfort, offer space. “I’d be a bit bitter if _I_ suddenly turned into a blonde.”

She talks into her hands, but he can _hear_ the small smirk on her lips. “That’s because you wouldn’t be able to pull it off.”

“Ha,” he laughs, a hearty sound. “You’re right. Not like you do.”

“I _do_ care,” she admits, lifting herself up and turning to face him, finally. “It’s hard to explain. It’s more than just not looking like myself, it’s that I feel… untethered. It’s not just that we’re out here, it’s like I don’t even have myself to retreat to. Makes me feel on edge, all the time.” 

He nods. There isn’t anything to say, so he just listens, patient, while long moments of silence pass unnoticed before she fills that space with terrified truths. 

“I don’t think I could handle another loss right now. I don’t think I could survive losing magic again, if I tried and it never comes back like before, if it always hurts like it did.” Another heavy pause. “I don’t have much hope. I don’t _want_ to hope. That’s just too much for me right now.” 

There’s a million things he wants to tell her, a million wrong things about how once he broke his wrist and regaining his strength there hurt like hell, but he did it anyway. He wants to say a million wrong things about how she’s wrong to lose hope, how it’s wrong of her to sell herself short, wrong to give up. He wants to say this isn’t her magic that did this to her, that there is nothing inherently broken about her now, that she is not and will never be defined by the harm that others did to her. Maybe those are a form of truth, but they do not outweigh this greater truth.

“That’s alright, then,” he says simply. Gently. Godric, he always feels fragile around her, like he’s glass that’ll shatter from her changing temperatures, like he’s just a delayed reaction waiting to break down with her if she let him, if she needed him to, if it would help her at all. He always feels fragile around her, in that way that it means he knows her, in that way that it means he understands her, in that way that it means he still feels fortified anytime he feels fragile. It isn’t something he understands, but it’s something that makes sense to him. “You don’t have to have hope right now. I’ll just have to have enough hope for the two of us. Can I do that for you? Is that alright with you?”

Lily closes her eyes. She takes in a deep, shaky breath, the sort of breath that betrays tears wanting to be released once more. Long moments of silence pass again, unnoticed, like the rest of time sits with bated breath for her response as well. 

“Yes.” She lifts her frail hand to wipe at the line of tears that seeped out, almost unnoticed, as well. Fragile, as well. “Yes, that’s alright.”

________________

“Someone tampered with the wards,” he says, looking up at the fire, then at her. She’s focused on her rabbit, cleaning it with the ease of someone far better practiced than he is. It’s been nice to have her show him the finer points of hunting again. These days, she’s taken over more of the hunting and preparation. He knows she’s desperate for something to do, for something to make sense, for something to feel in control over. He’d tried to ask her more about Slytherin in that same vein, to see how deep her knowledge of these muddy swamps and rivers ran, to give her a chance to show off, but instead his questions were met with dismissive shrugs. 

Now, though, he needs her input more than he needs her mood to be lifted. Lily doesn’t bother looking up from skinning the rabbit, careful in her task of trying to preserve the pelt as much as possible. They now have a small collection of pelts boiling in a pot he’d snatched from a cart suffering with a broken wheel. That’s another foreboding thing— when he asked how cold Slytherin gets in the winter, all she did was point at the bubbling hides with a significant look. 

After a while here in this clearing on this clear chill day, she finally remarks, “We already knew that.”

“No, no, I know— obviously, I mean, the last one we checked was _smoking_ wasn’t it?— but I mean even before that.”

That holds her attention; he’s rewarded with a glance from her out the corner of her eye. 

“Before the raid?”

“ _Before_. Moody thought there might have been a leak.”

If that is news to her, she doesn’t show it, except for in the way she stops working for that one moment. “Maybe you just didn’t set your wards correctly.”

“No. I did. Someone fooled with them.”

“Yes, I got that, thank you.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking—“

“Oh, I’ve asked you not to. The effort puts a wrinkle in your brow, most unattractive.”

“Shut up, it does not.”

“Hm,” she tuts without a care, turning her rabbit over, ready to gut. “No matter. You never would have noticed it. Anytime you check a mirror your mind is wonderfully blank of anything but admiration for your own reflection.”

“So you agree, then?” His smile has grown into a full smirk, reclined as he is on one elbow, watching her. “The reflection is worth the admiration?”

“Careful, Potter, _I_ never said so.”

“Right.” He’s still smirking. Without really looking at him still, she manages to hit him square in the forehead with the acorn she scooped from the ground. 

“That look, too. Unattractive.”

“Which is why you’re so intent on your rabbit.”

“That I prefer to see its innards over you should _not_ sound like the compliment your tone makes it to be.”

“What I _mean_ is,” James powers on, so well practiced in this particularly old familiar routine of theirs. “It is the _same_ someone _,_ who disabled the outer wards, who made that one smoke. The snake illusionist. He’s the same caster.”

“ _He._ Are you certain?”

“Yes.” Then, to state the obvious platitude, prattled off like the old adage it is. “All magic stays familiar.”

“Hm.” Now he knows he’s actually got her attention, because she’s looking at him properly, thinking. “He’s an illusionist. Why wouldn’t he hide his arcane signature on the outer ward?”

“To taunt me. Know any Eaters who might not like me, Evans?”

“How would you like the list? In order of distaste and suspicion or simply alphabetical?”

Now he’s rolling his eyes. “The day we reached the Hollows, with the cursed arrow and the banner— did you sense anything? Could you read the signature?”

Lily shakes her head ruefully. “I was a bit distracted by it all, to be perfectly honest. Even if I had thought to identify the Eater, you or someone else could have noticed me working magic over the banner.”

“That’s alright. I wasn’t expecting anything, really. But it’s annoying,” he laments, lying on his back, looking up at the clouds as she stakes the rabbit for roasting, “I swear. I’ve felt that magic before. It lingers like a foul taste.” 

________________

That morning was normal— maybe better than normal, considering he’d found a new road _and_ found some easily snatch-able fruits and cheeses there. Practically a feast for them! The day was normal— this new normal of learning magic with Lily as his coach, explaining how to draw runes with a finger and an image in his mind rather than his wand. She walked through the tanning process, asked him to change some rocks into salt and he _did._ Everything about that night, up until this point, was normal. Routine. 

They ate a rabbit with the cheese rations as he ticked away more of their plans for the next few days— they’ll try some laundry tomorrow, maybe, if it isn’t too cold. He rubbed on salve and pulled her shirt down for her again (then decides it’s _definitely_ laundry tomorrow, looking at the hem of her shirt and the grime on his stolen clothes). She tries to walk him through braiding her hair and he fails at the task _again_ , but he’ll get it right soon if he practices on some vine like she suggested. 

The night was normal. The fire is set to burn through the night and they’re pressed against each other, like normal. Lily’s always been better at falling asleep first, which makes sense. He still misses his diplomat’s tent and bed, she’s used to roughing it in barracks. Tonight, close as they are, fingers in her hair as they are, her head turning into his hand as it is, is another collection of evidence for his theory, that he can turn her deathly white hair red again— or _she_ turns her hair red again at his touch, at his fingers gently brushing through those ends, when she sleeps. Guard down. The guard— against him or her own magic— is yet to be determined. 

The night was normal. He fell asleep, there on the ground. Things _stopped_ being normal when he woke up (did he?), his eyes immediately adjusting to the bright white of the blank, hollow room he finds himself sitting in alone. 

Not alone, not alone, _not alone._

“Fucking fuck shit,” James exclaims, staring at the aberration in front of him. Or is he in front of him? He’s supposed to be asleep— at least, he thinks he’s been asleep, but he feels very much awake here in this space, which isn’t really a space. Everything is both very real and very intangible at the same time.

“Fuck!” The aberration exclaims back, apparently equally startled by his presence, which is rude, frankly, given the circumstances. _He_ isn’t the one who brought them here. 

Because, well, that’s _Sirius_ , sitting in front of him, cross-legged on the ground in this foggy white space. Only it isn’t Sirius.

“James? For real?”

“Er, I think so?”

“I’ll take it,” Sirius breaths out in a heavy sigh of relief, his hand jumping to his nice, silky black hair. Why does his hair look good, even now, when his eyes are…?

“I can’t see worth a damn,” Sirius says, looking up at James’ general direction. “I’ve been scrying for _weeks_ trying to reach you.”

“Your eyes— are they always—?”

Sirius reaches up to touch his face. “Malfunctioning?”

“Black orbs.”

“Interesting,” Sirius notes. “No, they are not usually like this. Why on earth _would_ they be?”

“We’ll get to that,” James brushes his question aside. He can’t move— that much he knows about this— but the urge to hug Sirius has him blinking away tears from his eyes. _Godric._ No matter how sure he was of his survival, the proof is ten weights lifted from his chest at once. 

“Remus, Peter—?”

“We’ll get to that,” Sirius nods, though James can’t read his expression— _alive,_ at the least. “Lily?”

“Alive,” James breathes out quietly, like the word itself is more affirmation than anything else these past weeks with her. That someone else knows— that they are not just ghosts wandering in the swamp, that she is not a memory haunting him— is another weight gone from him. They are witnessed; they are alive. 

Sirius, too far from him in this space, rubs his hands over his face, tired, laughing that laugh he does when things feel truly shit to him. “ _Fuck,_ I hate this, Evans was always the better scryer. I wish I could see your stupid face.” He rubs his eyes again, like that would restore vision to those pure black things, pupils, irises, and the rest. “I’ve been reaching out to her for weeks. I didn’t know if you’d have the juice to make the connection without your wand. But it seems you’ve learned a few tricks, Mage.”

James opens his mouth, and almost sensing it, or just _knowing_ him, Sirius waves a dismissive hand aside. “We’ll get to that,” he promises, sighing with relief again. “Good Godric and all his children,” Sirius huffs, an invocation James isn’t used to hearing from him. “Sweet Slytherin and his greasy, greasy bullocks—“ that one James _has_ heard, yes, “— am I glad to see you. Hear you. I thought you were _dead_. I thought no one could have survived that force that Evans baked up in that explosion. Only it’s weird, mate. It wasn’t an explosion.”

“It wasn’t,” James affirms, “She drew a transportation circle. Or conjured one? Or _was_ one? I don’t know, still. It _felt_ like an explosion.”

Sirius shakes his head. “That still doesn’t make sense. Evans grew an entire fucking _tree_ where you two were standing.”

“A tree?”

“Massive fucking thing, too. Basically sprouted fully grown.”

“Let me guess. Pink flower petals?”

“An abundance of them!”

“They followed us here. I can’t explain it. I think they’re her.”

Sirius tilts his head to the side, the way he does when he’s thinking. “Her?”

“Yeah. _Her.”_ James runs a hand through his hair, tugs at the curls a bit. “I’m still figuring it out. Something happened to Lily, Sirius.”

Sirius’ face hardens. He nods, and James explains everything. The curse, the phoenix tear, the days he thought she was dead and the days since that she has only looked like it. 

James explains almost everything. He skips over the salve, how it can work. He focuses instead on this, needing to solve the equation of the state of Lily Evans. 

“Smart to stay out of sight, then,” Sirius nods approvingly. James can see him think, see his strategic brain calculate each new piece of information. “I knew you would be together, wherever you were, dead or alive. Thank the Founders I can rely on you being too infatuated to do anything else.”

James maintains enough dignity not to respond to that. 

“Where did you say you are again? Actually, no, don’t answer me,” Sirius waves his hand. “It’s bad enough I know you’re alive. Best to stay hidden, even from me.”

“We _are_ hidden, best as we can be. Lily can’t be seen without notice,” James shakes his head, running his hand through his hair, laying out his puzzle pieces. “One glance at her shows she’s had a strange encounter with necromancy. But I’ve seen her _not_ be. She won’t use her magic right now, she’s afraid of it, but I think that’s the answer. I think she’s done the opposite of necromancy, whatever that is.”

“What, life magic?” Sirius furrows his eyebrows, unconvinced. Because it doesn’t exist, not really, what she’s doing. 

“Eaters deal in death. They have to kill to wield any power. I think she’s doing the same in reverse.”

“Hm. The first thing she managed was plant growth, you know. I was the one who figured out changing the state of things. She _made_ things… but I thought it was conjuration.”

“I think it’s creation,” James says quietly, not because he _thinks_ it is true but because he _knows_ it is, and that’s an absurdity. 

“The arcane can’t do that,” Sirius states the obvious. “Neither can the divine, for that matter. Creation isn’t simple blessings and healings or changing the state of things— it’s, well, _creating_ a state of things.”

“I’m not saying _how_ it’s possible,” he says, his tone ceding the fact that it should be impossible, “Only that she figured it out and seems to have no idea about what she did.”

Sirius, in a credit to his character, doesn’t immediately respond. He sits, drumming bus finders thoughtfully against his thighs. “Life and death are two sides of the same coin. Siblings. Mirrors. Mother and daughter, even. The existence of one demands the other.”

The tree. The petals. Saving his life, fighting for her own. These are the things she has created in the span of no time. James’ head starts to feel like it did when learning a new spell, like he’s on the cusp of something new, some new secret, some new revelation about the state of the world and its workings. He sees her again in his mind, white haired but full and lively faced, tending to the flower in her palm before the exhaustion. Life and death are siblings, but they’re also the same entity. One cycle. 

“The tree is still there, you know,” Sirius continues after a beat, musing. “Right where you left, already ancient, surrounded with those pink flowers like a spring meadow.”

“Really?” James looks up from his thoughts, his heart pounding. He hadn’t dared to hope. Not until now. “Then the Hollows haven’t been razed?”

“Home stands,” Sirius says proudly. “The 78th is smaller than we were, but the Hollows stand. Lily scared the lich,” he laughs again. “When that tree sprung it was like everyone froze in place. It was like _time_ stopped, and when it started again, the lich was gone. Ran like the coward he is, he and most Eaters. We’re stationed at the Hollows until the Mage’s Council figures out what happened.”

“Ugh, don’t tell me they’ve convened in the Hollows without me.”

“Malfoy wanted to declare you dead— not wanting to be the only one to agree with him is what kept me from fully believing the same, honestly. The official inquiry states both you and Evans as ‘missing’ only.”

“Are there people looking for us?”

“The Council. Eaters. Doge, too. You should start building divination wards if you can— or better, get Evans back up to snuff to construct one.”

“Doge?” James rolls his eyes. “What’s that fraud got to do with anything?”

“A lot, actually,” Sirius says, his tone a bit sharp. “More than I know for reasons I think _you_ know.”

“I don’t think—“

“No, shut up. Because I haven’t told you everything and you haven’t told me everything, either, for longer. So _you_ are going to tell the truth, all of it, or else I’m not going to explain why Moody’s holding Peter in the basement for suspected treason.”

“ _Peter?”_

“Yeah,” Sirius spits on the ground, a dismissal, a curse. “You remember the cleric, I assume? The one who stabbed Evans when you didn’t take her order like you should have?”

James feels his face heat up with embarrassment, regret. “We have been over this.”

“Not all of it. We haven’t been over this, because we didn’t know until now who let him into camp.”

James heart drops. “Oh, Pete. _No_.”

Sirius just nods. There is a cold detachment to him now, the outward appearance of ease and comfort in this cut-off a well practiced facade for him. “I’ve never seen Moody in such a fit.”

“What happened? There must be a reason, Peter wouldn’t…” James shakes his head, memory coming to him incriminating clarity. Peter had told them back at school about the good Men who helped his mother when his father died, just after he was born. Peter said she prayed to Gryffindor for her ruined fields to recover, a prayer that _James_ answered, not Godric. “His mother.”

“Peter swears that he didn’t know the cleric was armed. He says he was only doing what his mother asked, not trying to kill anyone. He’s facing charges for the cleric and Moody piled a few more on about revealing regiment whereabouts and activities to civilians. Longbottom’s convinced that Pettigrew showed the Men your wards, too, but there isn’t much more than suspicion there.”

“I have to come back,” is the first thing out of James’ mouth, his first thought, beyond all its improbabilties and impossibilities. “I’ll talk to Moody, I’ll talk to Peter—“

“Shut the fuck up,” Sirius just shakes his head at him, glaring through those eyes that can’t see. “Shut up. I didn’t tell you that for you to rescue Pettigrew, who _did_ do those things. I told you because I have to tell you explicitly _not_ to come back.” Sirius’ next words are punctuated with the cool sort of anger he’s capable of when he is really pissed, sharp and sophisticated as one of his silver blades. “Doge keeps hanging around the Hollows looking for you. He thinks _you_ grew the tree. He says you’ve fulfilled the prophecy.”

James makes a very undignified grunt of frustration, pulling at his hair. “I’m going to kill him.”

“Not if I kill you first. Why the fuck did you never mention that Doge thinks you’re some sort of Gryffindor incarnation? _That,_ James, is a much more viable reason to hate the Men than any other bad excuse you’ve given in the past.”

“I didn’t say anything because it didn’t matter,” James grits out through clenched teeth. “ _Fuck,_ is he just going around saying that?”

“To everyone in earshot and then some,” Sirius confirms, and James doesn’t exactly appreciate the tone, because it sounds just a bit too much like Sirius is amused by it. “Doge is trying to claim ownership of the Hollows now as a sacred religious site— he’s also trying to solicit Peter a pardon from Dumbledore. You’d love it. Godric’s Men have been seen around the grounds trying to get to the tree. Some are preaching in the town about your martyrdom but also about how you aren’t really dead, because you can’t die, because you’re Gryffindor himself come to right things.”

“Quit sounding so amused, Sirius.” James snaps. “It really isn’t funny.”

“It actually sort of is. I mean, the more I think about it, the more I really can’t believe you _weren’t_ bragging about this prophecy at every chance in school.”

“That’s because Godric’s Men never made this claim until after I was Mage. I never knew about it until Dumbledore mentioned it the first time I had to go to the monastery for Founder’s Day.”

“So are you?” Sirius asks, barely concealing a smirk on his face, the shit. “A Founder, that is. You have to tell me, otherwise it’s entrapment.”

“Shut up,” Janes scoffs, still finding no humor in this situation. “Of course I’m fucking _not_ , and it’s an idiotic thing in itself. The prophecy, or whatever the hell it actually is, actually just says that Gryffindor will return through Hollows’ bloodline. And then some brilliant mind decided that actually, Godric will return simply through my _blood.”_

“Oh, that version sounds more fun.”

“I hate the Godric’s Men. It’s a nonsensical thing, and I never asked for it, and one of them tried to kill me just to see if my blood would do the trick—“

“—oh, I thought it wasn’t even a good assassination attempt? I thought it wasn’t even—“

“Point taken, Sirius.”

“Alright, alright. Well, none of it is true regardless.. It’s not like you can do any divine magic anyway, right?”

James doesn’t answer, and he takes advantage of Sirius’ temporary loss of sight to look down at his lap, abated. He just goes on as before. 

“The Men _are_ a nuisance, but the good news for _me_ is that most of them have left to preach in your name. Some of them are heading out of Gryffindor to let the good people know that at least the true Founder is returned. Was returned?” Sirius pauses, looks confused for a minute, trying to figure out logic that doesn’t exist, before shaking his head. “Anyway, bad news for you is they’re heading out of Gryffindor. Maybe the average farmer can’t recognize you without your Mage’s robes, but _they_ could.”

“This is miserable,” James sighs, put out. “If they find me alive then I prove them right. And if we die— and that’s not out of the realm of possibilities here— then they can still claim to be right.”

“Bit of a pickle on your hands there, mate.” 

James just shakes his head ruefully. It’s the only thing he can do for himself right now, that, and tugging at the ends of his hair. 

“Fuck.”

“I know.” Sirius finally sounds sympathetic. 

“I mean, _fuck_.”

Bad to worse. His vision flickers, the room feels like it glitches; Sirius, blind, seems to feel it, too.

“ _Fuck,”_ Sirius moves his head around, trying to assess the quickly fading scene. “We don’t have much more time. Listen to me, then,” his voice is very serious, looking without seeing James dead in the eye, “Lay low and blend in— there is a price on both your heads that neither of you can afford. Don’t contact me again until you’re near the Hollows; we’ll cross that bridge when we have to. Fuck, James, just keep Lily safe and come home. We’ll figure out the rest.”

“Wait, Sirius, I—“ James can’t get the rest out his mouth, desperate as he is to ask more of Sirius, to see more of Sirius, to never let him out his sight. The flickers of the room hurt his eyes, there’s a ringing in his ear, and when he blinks, Sirius is gone. When he blinks, it is sunrise. Sirius is gone; Lily is still asleep, there on the ground next to him. 

It is sunrise. Lily, whose hair tips glow red where his fingers still lie, opens one green eye at him. 

“Everything alright?”

“Yes,” he breathes out immediately, an entire month’s worth of fear of confusion and grief leaving him all at once. _Yes,_ everything is more than alright if Sirius is alive, if the Hollows stand. _Yes,_ everything is more than alright, because of her. James closes his eyes against the bright light, relaxed, despite fucking everything else. “Everything’s alright.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> covid sucks! it sucks! this update comes at a particularly AWFUL covid time personally. on a not personal level here's info about a neat organization helping Navajo elders during the pandemic: https://anelder.org/The-Mission-and-Program-Services
> 
> and here's a twitter thread on current state of trans rights in the uk: https://twitter.com/extrasmallrobin/status/1352423999771447296?s=21
> 
> \--  
> forgot about this fun thing we used to do at the end of the chapter: sexiest aesthetic moment. i can't decide between sirius with solid black eerie eyes or the image of lily's white hair changing colors.
> 
> also! im not advertising my works anywhere like tumblr anymore so if you aren't subscribed you might miss the next update!


End file.
